


To love and to cherish

by PastelWonder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Age Difference, Alpha Armitage Hux, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Arranged Marriage, Breeding, But Sweet... ish, Dystopian, F/M, Fingering, Grooming, Knotting, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Misogyny, Multiple Orgasms, Omega Rey, Oral Sex, Praise Kink, Scarcity of females, Size Difference, Violent and Intense Scenes, creepy af, slowburn-ish
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-01-25 20:46:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18582283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: At the urging of his good country solicitor, the new Baron of Meryton procures a wife.





	1. does this man, take this woman

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Kept Woman](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16834213) by [MalevolentReverie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalevolentReverie/pseuds/MalevolentReverie). 



> This is an A/B/O underage love story set in dystopian steampunk Britian with noncon and dubcon themes. If you've found yourself here by mistake, go ahead and hit that back button to find Rux fics more to your taste. 
> 
> This work is completely inspired by the marvelous Ms. Reveries's 'Kept Woman'. If you have not treated yourself to a fiction by MalevolentReverie, you have not *lived*. DO. IT.

The virus killed Lord Brendol Alexander Hux. At least, that was what the coroner’s examiner told his wife, the barren, widowed baroness.

Armitage knew better.

It was drink that killed his father. Rotted his liver and ulcered his gut until finally the ravages stopped his heart cold. He died in the arms of a dark-skinned harlot on Firth Street of a Thursday morning. When Armitage went to the mortuary to identify his bloated, fetid corpse, there was still a ring of rouge around the old baron’s cock.

How his fair mother would have sniggered, her beautiful blue eyes backlit by mirth over the lace-edge of her fan, if she had lived to see this day.

 _Alas,_ he thought wryly, watching passively out the window of his steam-pulled carriage at the monotonous roll of Meryton’s countryside. Deep emerald earth and roiling grey skies. His gloved hand wrung the head of his cane.

_Her revenge was not._

Now, he was set to inherit the manor and all its estate. Some quarter million pounds, his solicitor told him, and an income of fifty thousand a year.

A staggering amount for a twenty-three year old royal officer. Even more so for whoreson.

 _“But what of a wife?”_ the solicitor, a humble Mister Granger, had pressed.

 _What indeed,_ sniffed Armitage bitterly as his hansom made the bend around a grove of twisted elms and lurched its way up the gravel path to a modest house set back behind a small lake. It was early spring, the naked elms reached up to lay their gnarled hands on the seething sky.

His two-team of mechanical horses chuffed exhaust as they stopped before the weathered limestone steps that led to the home’s main entrance. A pair of foreboding wood and wrought iron doors flanked on either side by stone lions. The perpetual rains had worn away the details of their faces.

Inside the foyer, he removed his top hat and cape.

The receiving room was plain but tidy. He inspected closely at the fading wallpaper spanning both stories for signs of peeling, and along the baseboards for droppings of mice or rat. Finding none, he examined the central staircase that led at a double-width to its first landing, then separated on either side in two smaller flights to the upstairs portion of the house. The runner was swept, steps unbroken _._

_Good._

It wouldn’t do to have his girl raised in squalor.

A movement caught the corner of his eye.

At the base of the first story landing, a little girl no older than five had hidden herself behind the balusters. Her blonde hair was gathered into two tidy bundles above her ears. Through the spindles, she wondered curiously at his shocking, tightly styled crop of red hair.

Upon recognizing she’d been sighted, she stuck her small hand between the balusters and curled her fingers in shy greeting.

He lilted his chin and kept his hands folded firmly behind his back.

“My my, Miss Kaydel,” a kindly older woman swept into the foyer. She was dressed as a governess, in simple, unassuming black. And unfathomably old.

The child hidden behind the staircase giggled.

The woman folded her hands in front of her, rattling a set of keys on an iron ring at her waist. Her tone was stern, yet warm, “Shall I tell your Alpha you’ve been prancin’ about strangers when you should be taking in your lessons at the piano?”

“No, Missus Maz,” the little girl whipped her head sullenly, warbling her little buns.

“Well then. See that you’re off,” the old crone turned to greet him as the child scampered off down a hall.

The humor left her eyes as she observed shrewdly, “You must be Officer Hux, then. My, you’re a punctual one.”

Her tone irked him. It was not a greeting befitting a powerful baron. Whoreson or not.

“I am, madam,” he did not incline his head in curtesy. Rather, he eyed her coolly down the bridge of his nose. “On both accounts.”

“Well, that’s a plus I suppose,” she gave him a last flickering onceover as she gathered her skirts until they revealed the buckles on her severe-looking shoes. Without preamble, she started up the stairs.

“Come along then, young man. You must be anxious to see your girl. Though I’ve a mind to warn you, she is sleeping-”

Her voice trailed the landing as she rounded the newel to the staircase on the right, “ _Let sleepin’ babes lie…”_

“Tell me, Misses… Kanata,” the stairs groaned beneath his weight but bore him solidly as he followed, “is it usual for the girls to run loose about the house?”

“I see you have no knowing of children,” she sighed.

Pausing on the last step before the landing, she turned to look down on him.

His jaw clenched. He held the dulled banister in his black-gloved hand.

Her smile was insolent, enigmatic. “We’ll soon fix that.”

Again, in the darkened, creaking corridor lined on either side by closed doors, he searched for any sign of rats.

“You’ll find no droppings, Officer, because I keep no vermin,” her voice drifted back to him over her shoulder. He had to shorten his long, elegant stride to stay well enough behind her quick, mincing one, “My girls are kept clean, warm, and well-fed. They have their lessons, and their little pleasures-”

At the last door on the hall, she stopped and turned. Her kind eyes were cold as they swept over him.

“Till they quicken. What you lot do with them after, I pray to God I never know.”

Outraged, he swelled.

But before he could rebuke her impudence, she pushed the door open.

The tiny mewls from inside stopped him cold.

“Ah,” all of the affection had returned to her voice. She spoke softly, eyes lit by something that made his gut twist uncomfortably tight, “There she is, our girl. _Rise, rise, open thy sleepy eyes_ …”

 _“For the world is waking, it is for your taking,”_ his mother’s voice carried the tune inside his mind.

Tentatively, he stepped inside.

There were two cradles in the room, both lined in fine, clean linens and lace ruffles loving wrought. The first was empty save a folded cloth, but in the second-

His breath caught.

Though she was unimaginably small and her glands would not yet be fully formed, he could scent her.

_My bride._

His chest ached as the old crone slipped her shriveled hands beneath head and bottom to lift the babe inside her swaddling.

“Careful,” he croaked, reaching vaguely. He swallowed.

_Making a damned fool of yourself-_

“We’re fine, aren’t we, lass?” the woman soothed and swayed her bundle.

Again, he swallowed, heart high in his throat. His dark, polished boots seemed welded to the floor.

“See he’s nervous?” she crooned and bounced lightly, “you’ve made the poor fellow shy. Call to him, dearling.”

The babe cooed, oblivious.

Still, his pulse raced, as hooves pounding across the highland. The floorboards chirped loudly to his ears as he moved slowly inside the room.

“There, that’s it, Officer. Arm up, elbow out. We’ll settle her in the crook. There’s a lad. Just like that…”

His breath shook. He dared not move, least he disturb the tiny drop of life nestled in the bend of his arm. Her weight felt fluid, fragile inside the delicate cloth. He stared down into her perfect porcelain face, fully enraptured as her small hands curled and uncurled and wavered uncertainly above the hem of her swaddling.

She blinked, and yawned.

Lost. He was hopelessly, hopelessly lost.

“What do you call her?” he murmured, daring to shift ever-so-slightly to smooth his hand down her belly over the cloth. His eyes never once left her face.

The crone sighed long-suffering. “Whatever you like, I suppose.”

His brow furrowed. He bent, as if bowing to an unseen force, to nuzzle the tip of her nose with his own. _God,_ she smelled so…

 _Familiar._ So perfectly _right._

“You mean she has no name?” he tore his gaze away to glance at the woman.

She was watching him through another shrewd stare. Though this time, he sensed something moving beneath the surface of her milky sight. Something rankling and victorious, as if she’d glimpsed both their hands in a game of cards and knew already that she’d won.

“We call her Rey, but you may change it, if you like,” she folded her hands in front of her skirts and shrugged, “Narcissa is a very popular name. As is Roselyn.”

“ _Rey,”_ he repeated below his breath. Her head lolled sweetly in his crook, she began to root softly at his chest.

His heart shuddered. He ached in a way he’d never felt before.

_My darling Rey._

“Now,” Maz spoke over his bride’s gentle burbles.

For the first since their meeting, she smiled. “About her price…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Hurry _up_ , Rey!” Rosie whispered from where she was meant to keep a lookout by the larder door.

She was making a piss-poor job of it, by Rey’s estimation, though she wouldn’t tell her that. Rosie may be her best friend, but she was also a crybaby, and an awful tittle-tattler.

And Rey’s Alpha wouldn’t like her saying _piss._

“Hurry,” Rosie flapped her hands wildly. Her crinoline chattered quietly beneath her robin’s blue dress, her long black curls bouncing in their ribbons around her face, “‘fore the pirates come!”

Standing on the seat of Cook’s stool, Rey reached up on her veriest tiptoes to reach the sweetmeats jar on the high shelf. The larder was under the main house, rough-hewn stone all around and cold as Anna Artica. The hem of her pretty frock rode up her stockinged thighs, and a cool breath tickled beneath her layers of crinoline at her bum.

She strained her tiny fingertips at the jar.

“ _Get down!”_ Rosie hissed, “Missy Nata is coming! Get down get down get down-”

Rey’s heart pattered. Boy, she better climb _fast._

Her little laced satin slippers, same pale pink as her dress and the ribbons in her hair, had barely hit the floor before the jangle of Missy Nata’s keys rounded the corner. She swept her curls back with her forearm from her eyes and tried her best to look innocent.

“Well well, if the Devil himself hasn’t left some of his little helpers behind,” their lady-mother’s hands folded in front of her skirts. She was trying very hard not to smile, “Whatever shall I tell your Alphas?”

“We was playin’ ‘ventures!” Rey, ever the braver one, parlayed on their behalf. Rosie took one of her small, moist hands in her own and stared down at her slippers.

“We _were_ playing, my dear,” Missy Nata tutted, “and lower your voice, if you please.”

Rey flushed at the way to her chest, incensed by the gentle admonishment. She huffed and kept on in an emphatical whisper, “We _had_ to get the treasures before the pirates came-”

“Enough.” Missy Nata peered at them both down the length of her nose through her spectacles. “This is not the behavior I expect of young ladies aged four-and-three-quarters.”

Rose whimpered and sucked her thumb. Rey glowered at the floor.

“You especially, Miss Rey. What would the General say to you climbing on Cook’s furniture?”

Rey’s eyes pricked hotly. She snorted at the stonework.

“He’d say, _Give my missy what she wants_ ,” she imitated his prim, regal tone.

It was her lady-mother’s turn to snort. She hide her humor behind her loosely clenched fist, then smoothed her skirt. Behind her spectacles, her eyes danced with tender mirth as she held out her hands to them.

“Let’s go ask him then, shall we?”

Rey’s heart tripped, like her feet in these stupid slippers when she ran too fast. “No _please_ , Missy Nata! Don’t make him cross-”

“Then come along, you two,” after a beat, she gestured impatiently, “For heaven’s sake, _come along_ -”

 

 

 

 

 

The front foyer with brimming over with flushed, giggling girls.

Rey hid behind the newel of the bottom stair and covered her hears to block out the noise.

Their prattle was deafening. The big girls gushed and tittered as they preened for their Alphas, while the little ones whooped and clamored and screeched to be picked up. Delighted shrieks pierced the air as Alpha’s hoisted their daughters up by their waists or hitched them around their shoulders to ride them like saddled ponies. Their boisterous, booming voices frightened her, their musk overwhelmed the foyer, making her tummy churn unpleasantly.

Rosie was already with her Alpha, a huge, hulking beast that was colored like a vulture, with hands bigger than a Clydesdale’s hooves. He was holding her up above him, her little legs dangling down, nuzzling noses with her and cooing dumbly as she giggled and giggled more.

Rey hunkered down behind the balusters. She clapped her ears tighter and pinched her eyes.

“Heavens, what a raucous,” someone remarked mildly from above.

Her heart leapt and skitter-pattered. _Alpha!_

His scent whispered over her, clean and crisp and _calm_.

Her eyes blinked open. He was kneeling before her in his dark regimentals, his long cape pooled all around him. His bright hair shimmered like fire under the hanging glass bulbs of the foyer. His forearm was draped casually over his knee.

Something flip-flapped inside her, like the fluttering of a hummer-bird, at the familiar sight of his cool blue eyes. Like the sky in wintertime when there were no clouds. Like the little crystal gazing ball he gave her last time he was here.

That’s what a father did, wasn’t it? Bring their daughters baubles and toys?

 _She_ had the sweetest father in all the world.

“Papa!” she lurched up into his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck. She buried her face into his collar. “Papa-papa-papa!”

He smelled like rain, and warmth, and love.

“You’re home,” she mewled, throat aching. Her heart swelled and ran over. She burst into tears.

“There there, my treasure,” he whispered. He nuzzled deep into her curls and rocked her, patting gently at her little back, “Shh, little one. Papa’s home.”

 


	2. Comfort her, honor and keep her..

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few jumpcuts, 'cause you know your girl can't tell a story linearly to save her *life*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also-
> 
> This is a little different from my usual. More fantasy, more macabre music box. I'm trying out something different, a new style. 
> 
> Your patience and kind feedback are so appreciated : ) . As always, you can check out my author page for more canon-ish works if that's your taste. And the other incredible artists here in the Rux comms. Ask me and I'll rec you my favs.

_London, 1891_

“I’m afraid you must select her _now_ , my lord,” his solicitor, Mister Granger, leaned a little nearer over the rosewood table. The sultry lights of the billiards room at the Melbourne Club made a reflective sheen over the curved surface of his beady yellow eyes.

A gentleman passing briefly by their table changed with his profile the angle of the grainy, colored light trickling down from the stained glass lamps suspended above the club. Mister Granger’s slit-pupils dilated then contracted.

The very tip of his forked tongue lashed anxiously between his snout as he pressed on, “The cultivation process is rather a _lengthy_ one…”

“Is it?” Armitage drawled, affecting boredom when his true feeling was more like disgust. Both from Mister Granger’s revolting visage and his ludicrous counsel. _Cultivate a wife._

What utter tosh.

He disguised his grimace behind a long draw on the cigarillo he held elegantly in one long, pale hand.

“I do not think so, Mister Granger,” he said finally. He raised his two fingers to signal a service drone for their bill.

Mister Granger’s strange, transfigured hand landed on the polished wood between them. It was not unlike a crocodile’s, yet not unlike a man’s.

“I urge you, my lord, to reconsider.” Below the table, his tail lashed nervously at the floor.

It had struck Armitage many times over that the virus had been quite cruel to some creatures as it passed genre to genre. Compared with misfortunates like Mister Granger, permutations such as his own were considered quite adaptive. Tolerable.

_Slight._

Therefore it was no surprise that Alphas such as he had emerged from the ravages of the virus as the ruling class, over what he supposed one could call civilization. Ruthless, hyper intelligent and indomitable, with physical strength ten times that of a pre-mutated man, the Alphas had only to settle the hierarchy amongst themselves before pinning the rest of the masses beneath their thumbs. They had but one Achilles’ heel.

_Omegas._

The only balm to soothe their violent, ravening hearts.

And the only compatible biology for which to bear children. Satisfaction for the savage yearning that pounded constantly inside the gut of every Alpha. To conquer a pretty little female and plant his seed deep within her belly.

_Archean._

Armitage sneered. “And what if I should not prefer a wife?”

He leveled his solicitor a cool, skeptical look. His tone was clipped. Severe. “After all, I am a busy man. My duties keep me away from Meryton for months at time, often overseas. And soon I shall join the political fray, where I intend to do quite well, despite my _disadvantages-”_

At the bold allusion to his low birth, his solicitor winced.

“I daresay I won’t have time to entertain a mewling, quivering quim. Let alone _pups,”_ he practically spat the word onto the table.

“But sir,” Mister Granger’s beady eyes flickered about the club as he leaned in and lowered his voice, “Imagine the alternative.”

 _That_ thought gave Armitage pause.

Where they sat well aside from the raucous chitter and heavily-spiced cigar smoke of the gentleman’s club, he glanced briefly through the crystalline glass of the brass-framed window out into the murky London night.

Across the cobbled road from the club, a small slave block was illuminated by hovering gas lamp. Handmaidens of all colors and kinds were huddled demurely onstage, as below them, gentlemen in silk top hats and velvet caplets made elegant gloved gestures at the auctioneer to bid their price.

These girls, he knew, would be barren to him, and sick besides. Their tender bodies ruined at birth by the virus that still lingered in the air.

They would not live to see twenty-five.

He did not think he could stomach a rotating cache of bed slaves. Should he become attached to one, he did not think he could bear it if she-

Thinking of his fair, beautiful mother, he cleared his throat abruptly.

“These Omegas, from the _Conservatory_ , Snoke guarantees their health?”

“Oh yes, yes absolutely he does,” the solicitor’s snout bobbed eagerly. He seized upon his opening with enthusiasm, “ _And_ their viability. Come and see the girls-”

A service drone interrupted his sale’s pitch with the bill. Its exposed gear mechanics glinted like polished brass as it bowed and churned away.

He did not argue as Armitage reached into his breast pocket. “It’s a smart operation, top-of-line, best in class. Highly recommended by all my clients-”

“Mm,” was all Armitage said as he folded a stack of bills from which he’d paid for their drinks and slipped it neatly into its clip.

“But we must go _soon_ , my lord. They only sow new brides once per year, and you’ll want to reserve your place on the list,” the good solicitor took a breath and tried clumsily to drain his drink. He struggled to fit the fluted rim of the glass against the hard ridge of his snout. His talons scratched audibly as he gurgled and lapped.

It gave Armitage a moment to consider the uncomfortable desires coiling low inside his gut. In the bottom of his own snifter, he saw watercolor images of a pretty girl in long dresses and tinkling bracelets and hairstyles dotted with small white flowers. Giggling and speaking to him musically as she led him by the hand through sunlit gardens and the rooms of his sprawling house. Her belly swollen and sweetly rounded. Kneeling down at her feet to kiss the life he’d made inside her. Her little fingers stroking through his hair-

The crack of a cue-ball meeting its racked companions across the room scattered his thoughts.

“Very well.” He stood.

A nearby attendant-drone whirred away to fetch his hat and cloak. He took his cane from its place behind his chair. “Please arrange a visit at the _Conservatory_ for Tuesday next.”

The solicitor’s grin was one of the most disgusting sights he had ever seen. “Excellent! Wonderful. Oh how _delightful_. I promise you, my lord, you will not be disappointed-”

Placing his top hat upon his crisp hairstyle, the new Baron rapped his cane twice. The smile he gave would unsettle even a creature such as Mister Granger.

“I had better not.”

 

_Meryton, 1893_

In the foyer of Kanata Hall, Armitage tapped off lightly the rain beaded on his black silk top hat.

“Goodness, Officer Hux,” this time, the old crone Maz was standing on the first landing of the great staircase to greet him. As usual, she was bespectacled, dressed severely in black. And frowning down on him.

She folded her hands. “We were beginning to wonder if you were ever coming back.”

“Good evening, Misses Kanata,” he drawled coolly as he handed his cape, hat and cane to an ancient attendant drone waiting beside him. Its exposed gear work inside its chest behind a brass butler’s jacket was tarnished but well-maintained. It clicked and wheezed as it bowed.

“It was my understanding that visiting days were an open invitation, rather than an obligation. And it is Admiral, now,” he added, meeting her eyes with an impassive gaze.

She looked remarkably unimpressed. “Well then. You have been busy.”

“Quite.”

“Very well,” she turned without so much as a gesture towards the leftmost flight of stairs to the second floor. “She’s had her bath and a feeding-”

He took the wide, solid steps two-at-a-time until he reached parody with the old woman.

“-she’s onto solids now. Porridges, mainly, and the like. But she does still prefer the breast at morning and at night-”

He concealed his smirk behind a delicate cough. _Who does not?_

“We had to rush her a bit, for your _impromptu_ visitation,” she glanced sideways at him, pleasantly seething.

_This insufferable creature…_

His jaw ticked against the impulse to snap her neck and watch her roll down the steps.

Instead, he inclined his head in civility, “Thank you for obliging my request. As you know, I’ve been away. To India. Bombay precisely, or rather what is left of the place. I’ve only just returned to Meryton by train. This morning, in fact.”

She settled her skirts as they took a pause on the landing. Her tone was airy, informative. Haughty, “Don’t expect it to happen again, Admiral. We keep a strict schedule of visitations so as not to upset the girls-”

Something stalking and snarling within him raised its head, as behind his back he clenched his leather gloves. Yet somehow, he managed to keep his voice tacitly politely.

But only just.

“Yes, I understand-”

“-you see it’s quite unsettling when an Alpha _waltzes in_ unexpectedly,” she carried on, “It makes the other girls jealous, and terribly anxious.”

“I see,” his eyes narrowed. He lilted his chin, “and do you pander to the… _anxieties_ of little girl-children often, Misses Kanata?”

She glowered but ignored his question. “It can be ages before I get them to settle down.”

“My my,” he remarked with mock-wonder, “an unsettled group of young girls. What a calamity. And to think we officers of the Imperial Army make much ado about border conflicts and radical insurrectionists when you are here enduring such extreme adversities, Misses Kanata.”

She reddened and swelled, “Wha- I-”

“My bride,” he cut off her retort with a sweeping gesture at the dimly lit corridor lined with doors. He smiled dangerously, “if you would be so kind.”

Upon her hesitation, his eyes flashed backlit in the low ensconced lighting. “Or will you make me scent her out?”

Her nostrils flared, she glared behind her glasses but lurched forward without another word, house keys rattling in time with her furious mincing march.

He twitched his lips to disguise his smirk before he followed.

“There we are,” already her tone had thawed by the time she twisted the handle to a door four-down on the left, “see who’s bright-eyed and bushy tailed when her gentleman comes to call.”

A gentle, pretty-sounding, _“Gaah-aah,”_ from inside made his throat cinch tight.

His pulse took flight as his footsteps slowed down. He hesitated before breaching the threshold.

He did not know what he had expected to find, though truthfully, all this time he’d pictured her as she was the eve they met. Tender and helpless. Wrenchingly small. Lying safely inside her swaddling for all the nights he was away. Dark eyes peering calm and knowing from beneath her little lace-brimmed bonnet. Flinching gently away from the light.

Nothing could have prepared him for the change nine months had wrought.

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever beheld.

Round, rose-colored cheeks dominated a delicate face perfectly formed. Her eyes which had lightened were like a doll’s, large and rounded and wreathed in lashes not yet long enough to carry a curl. Her tiny rosebud mouth was soft and lush, her lips appearing faintly lined by a deeper pink, as her nose that sat above it was pert and smooth and wondrously small.

She was a living, breathing porcelain confection. All plumpness and pinked skinned with just the finest whisper of brown hair upon her crown.

His hand physically went to his chest as his heart below it stopped and then restarted, pounding to a painful, strangling emotion he dare not name.

She stood up from her knees at her crib railing, latched onto two of the beaded spindle rails with her chubby, dimpled hands to keep her balance.

His breath caught, eyes stinging strangely as he forgot himself and his dislike of Misses Kanata and pointed, “Do you see that? Do you see her standing? It’s incredible-”

His babe studied his enthusiasm with wary hazel eyes.

“My darling,” he called her quietly.

She burst into wailing.

Turning away from him, she stamped her tiny socked feet and raised her hands towards Kanata.

“They can be quite shy of strangers,” the old witch crowed smugly as she hefted his Rey up and onto her hip.

The babe hid her face in her breast and sobbed.

His heart ached, as guilt-rippled envy unfurled rankling against his ribs.

_I’ve been a fool to stay away._

He swallowed his recriminations and stepped boldly through the nursery. His girl could sense his approach, shrilling louder as she kicked and burrowed more deeply in the old woman’s breast.

“Hand her to me,” he said quietly, reaching out with authority. Though he had no idea if the way he held his hands was correct.

Kanata hesitated, stroking the child’s head and bouncing lightly. The sound of his little one’s wailing wound something in his gut unbearably tight.

_“She will be, by design, that which your soul knows as its mate. Instantly. You will fall instantly, deeply into a love like you have never known.”_

Was that not the mad doctor’s promise? How Armitage had scoffed below his breath to his solicitor, _“Ludicrous. Is this man a geneticist or an amateur poet?”_

 _Both,_ he realized, seeing the poetry in his own mate even as she shrank away from him.

“Madam,” he warned Kanata calmly, hands still outstretched and waiting, “I will not ask you a third time.”

She glowered and clucked her tongue and huffed. But in the end, she relented. “Very well-”

Rey’s panicked shrieks met their ear-splitting crescendo as she was ripped gently away and placed inside her Alpha’s arms.

Her face had reddened hotly, streaked by tears that dampened and separated her lashes and drenched his neck as he pressed her tenderly to his gland.

He kissed her temple. His voice was hardly a whisper in her little ear as he said, “There there, my sweet. Gentle down, now. Gentle down…”

Her small fists balled in his suit jacket, she wriggled and screeched.

“I know, Rey, I know. You’re very cross with me,” he crooned. He closed his eyes, and Miss Kanata, the dull yellow light of the room and the horrors of India all faded away. He sensed only his Omega’s warm weight against his chest. “I do understand. What a terrible husband I’ve been to you. Can you forgive me? Perhaps when you see what I’ve brought-”

To Misses Kanata, he spoke loudly enough to be heard over his babe’s cries. But only just, “Please have your butler bring in her trunk from my carriage. My driver shall help him. And warm a bit milk for her, if you would be so kind. In a teacup, with a spoon.”

Quite insensibly, the old hag blustered. Her ancient bosom swelled and she spat, “ _I_ am mistress of this house. Not a servant of yours, _Admiral._ I do not work for you, you insolent man.”

His eyes opened, as shock followed quickly by something furious and scaled sluiced down his spine.

This impudent, lunatic _witch_ thought she could speak to him that way? Why, because he was a whoreson? Not _gentlemanly_ enough for her?

Seething, he gently hitched his babe higher, ignoring for the moment her pitched squalls that split and rung his ear next to her face as he stepped up to loom darkly over Misses Kanata. His voice was nearly silent, though he could tell by the fear reflected in her eyes that she heard every word.

“How curious. You say you are not under my employment, when it is I who have paid you thirty thousand pounds for services to this girl I hold in my arms. Whom I and I alone _own._ And as I’ve paid you _in full_ for services due, you may take your sneering, and your backchatter, madam, and _shove it up your skirt_. Now _,”_ his gaze bore down on her as an ironsmith’s smelting rod, “go and do as I have told you. _”_

She hesitated quivering a moment too long, and he gnashed his jaws and thundered, _“Now!”_

The crone let out a shuddering breath. Though her mouth shook and she trembled beneath his fury, she raised her head in a facsimile of dignity before she bowed. “Very good, my lord…”

He did not watch her go.

“Shh-shh-shh, I know, cherished, I know. Alpha lost his temper,” he bounced and patted her very tenderly as they walked slowly about her room. Her wails were deafening, but after years in foxholes and trenches bombarded by grenade-blast and millions of machinegun rounds, he was impervious to percussion. He rubbed soothingly at her back as her cries began to yield to tepid bleats and then wrung-out mewls. “There there, precious. See? We have weathered the worst of it, I think. Now we shall sit down and have a little chat. Hm, would you like that? Let us try-”

The rocking chair in the hind corner of her nursery smelled of lemon oil and smooth-planed cedar, it took their weight with an elegant _creak_ as gingerly, he settled them in.

His babe’s face was still red and damp from her frustrations. He blew cool spools of breath over her as he rocked and stroked her from her head to the soft soles of her feet. Her hiccups petered out, she let out only the occasional mew as she tucked herself against his neck.

Her scent cocooned him. If ever he had felt serene in his life, it was now, lulled by the rhythmic creak of the rocking chair with her slight weight on his chest and her warm, moist breath puffing against his gland.

“There we are now, there’s my sweet girl. Now. What shall I tell you, my treasure? Hm? Would you like to hear of India, is that what you would like? Oh there is so much to tell you. So many delights that I’ve brought back for you. For you see my love, I thought of you every moment, of every day…”

 

 

 

 

_Meryton, 1897_

Of all the things Rey loved to do with her Alpha; and there were so many things, like showing off her hopscotch, walking the gardens as she held his thumb in her hand or listening to his stories in his deep, rolling voice; picnics were by far her very favorite.

The English sky was a patchwork of light and darker greys, stitched through at random places with feathered seams of white and overlapping like tufts of wool at the top of a burlap sack. She watched it creep over them through the thick, wavering branches burdened by riotous green leaves of the ancient black alder tree they supped under. Her Alpha in his smart black uniform, looking regal and strong. She wrapped up in her cozy new cloak.

Crushed velvet and satin lining, winter-white. Trimmed all the way round in perfect pompoms of real rabbit fur. It even had a hood she could pull up to feel secretive and romantical, only the wind blew it back each time she did. He’d given her a set of cream-colored leather gloves to match, also trimmed in white fur with pompoms hanging down from the wrists on satin ribbon. And a beautiful white leopard fur hat.

She’d turned the hat upside for the moment and set it on a corner of the blankets he’d spread out several layers thick beneath the tree, and nestled her dolly inside. She tucked in the gloves around little Sophia-doll, not wanting to spoil them with crumbs or jams. And so that her Sophia-doll wouldn't catch a cold.

 _“What an excellent mother you are,”_ her Alpha praised where he was stretched out long on his side on top of the blankets, temple propped up on his fist. Behind him, the dark waters of the glassine lake reflected back the bare, budding trees and waving green leaves of the alder trees and elms, and the thick grey sky, and all the soft long-grass and daffodils and waterlilies that grew near its edges.

His praises always tingled her in her chest and in the tips of her toes.

Right now, her toesies were tucked up under his ribs to stay warm, her horrible laced slippers abandoned at some far corner of the blankets after he warned her lowly not to chuck them into the lake. She held in her hands an ivory ball he brought back to her all the way from China, turning it slowly around and around. 

It was perplexful, this ball. Carved intricately so she could see through it in parts, like crochet but lovelier. Inside of it there was another, littler ball. And inside that one, another.

They rolled and rolled around as she spun them over in her hands, frowning her little heart-shaped mouth very seriously. It was a riddle, how the smaller balls came to be inside the big one.

Rey loved and hated riddles.

“Can it come apart?” she piped, still studying with her brow creased and mouth pursed.

Her Alpha smiled, a smile as ivory and mysterious as her Chinese ball. “It cannot.”

Beneath the hem of her dress, his long, white fingers were strumming softly through her stockings at her thighs. His touch was ever-so gentle, like the draw of a feather. He never snatched or pinched, her Alpha. He never tickled her too hard or swung her up too high. He stroked and he petted and he watched.

“Shall I tell you its secret, or will you have another guess?” his fingertips niggled lightly at her belly beneath her dress.

She giggled and shrank away, showing all her baby teeth as the smaller balls rattled inside their ivory cage.

He retreated with a smirk. “Come on, let’s have another theory. _Use your imagination.”_

She huffed, and thought.

The wind blew a bit of her glossy spring curls hanging down from her two front ribbons across her eyes. It lifted a few strands of her Alpha’s strange hair too. They stood and wavered like threads of fire, burning even in the dull British afternoon.

He was like a magic creature, her Alpha. Tall and sleek and very strong. Like a lion from India. But linen paper-white. Except for his mane, which was as bright as shredded carrot, jewel-ly and always changing color with the light. And his eyes.

His strange, blueful eyes.

Her little tummy flip-flapped whenever he looked into her with those eyes. There was something odd and familiarable about them, they were tender but somehow too bright. Like she might hurt her own eyes by looking into them too long. But like a dark hole beneath a willow tree leading down somewhere deep and warm and still, she wanted to tip over and fall into them.

They were looking at her now as he called her, “My treasure-”

His hand reached up slowly to stroke her curls back over her shoulder, “Have you thought of an answer?”

“Yes,” she said shyly, as her belly dipped and fluttered. She didn’t know why she should feel shy with him, but she did sometimes. “I think maybe… well, if it dossen come apart-” she bit her lip and waited, desperately not wanting to sound silly or dumb.

He nodded patiently. “Go on.”

“If it dossen come apart, then… they had to be made all together. Like-” she looked all around the rolling emerald grounds for her example. “Well, like me. Coz I got, sort of bones and stuff inside me. And a brain, and a heart-”

“Don’t you just,” her Alpha was smiling, that tender, pleased smile he got whenever she said something correct.

It made her excited as she went on reasoning it out, “So if I can be made with all the bits inside me already put in, not having to be opened, like a dollhouse, then- so can this ball?”

“ _Excellent_  deduction, my dear,” his eyes danced in the grey, sieving light of the passing clouds, “a clever use of _critical reasoning._ You may be the most brilliant little girl I’ve ever met. Why yes, I think you are.”

She swelled, practically about to burst with happiness. She threw back her head and laughed like a haughty little crow.

He chuckled.

“Won’t you have some more to eat, my dear?” He tickled the little bit of extra beneath her baby chin as she came down from her rush among the clouds, “I worry you’re becoming a bit too thin.”

 _Ha!_ Suddenly she slammed her ball down on the blankets next to her. Its babies trapped inside it jingled wildly.

She _knew_ it-

“Thass what I told Missy Nata!” she flapped her tiny dimpled finger in his face. “Yesserday, when she said I couldn’t have no more sweetmeats coz it wasn’t Firstday. I told her I was _starvin’_ –“

“Might you mean _Thursday,_ cherished?” her Alpha asked mildly as he reached around her little waist for the spread he’d laid out for them.

He’d brought all her most favorites, the rare, luscious treats mean ol’ Missy Nata never let them have. Fat olives stuffed with sweet pimento and sharp cheeses, dilled pickles and succulent red peppers roasted and jarred in sugared jam. Deviled eggs with paprika sprinkles and long, sticky reels of deep pink salmon-fish spread with capers and creamed cheese. Tea sandwiches on white toast with no crusts.

And sweets upon sweets upon _sweets_.

Macaroons and sugared plums. Roasted hazels drizzled in honey and dates chopped with peanuts and pistachios, petite fours and caramel bonbons and real raw honeycombs dipped in dark chocolate and white. All sorts of candies and biscuits besides.

Rey _loved_ to eat, and her Alpha loved to feed her. Mainly by his hand.

“Yes yes, Thurssay,” distracted for a moment by a fallen golden lash, her fingertip trailed warbling along his pale cheekbone as he peeled a section off a little tangerine and popped it in her mouth.

Her Alpha’s blue eyes narrowed. He frowned, “Shall I speak with her, before I leave?”

A bead of clear, sticky juice rolled down her chin as she nodded eagerly and chewed.

He thumbed it away. “Very well then. I shall.”

Rosie’s Alpha was just the same way, gen’rous and doting and protectful. Like Armitage, Kylo brought her pinwheel pastries and jellied-fruit tartlettes by the boxful, and loads of other gifts besides. They got long fur cloaks and pretty wool peacoats dyed beautiful colors, trunks full of dresses, Rosie’s in pinks and yellows, and Rey’s in every hue of white and blue. Bonnets, satin and leather gloves, lace and painted silk fans. Dollies and parasols and glass and pewter animals with sets of real jewel-chip eyes. Music boxes and little rice papers pressed at the edges with flower petals on which to practice writing letters or drawing birds. Rosie’s gifts were always prettyful, usual and simple. Meant especially for a little girl.

But Rey’s were exotic, sometimes strange or thrilling grotesque. A few of her cloth dolls were as black as midnight, with printed caftans and turban hats. Her animal figures were of camels and tigers and cobras, elephants and bears, not kittens and sheeps. Her Alpha brought her books too, something Rosie’s didn't. Some were picture books, but others were mostly word-books written in strange languages with squiggly letters. Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit and Cantonese. Their few pictures were frightening and fascinating and grossly beautiful. Between their pages, her Alpha pressed rare flowers and fronds from all the places he went to. In one there was a butterfly pinned meticulously over a drawing of a man and a woman snuggling naked under a star-studded night. He left her love notes in them too, simple ones she could read on her own if she struggled to sound them out.

_“I m-m-mii-ss you. I l-love you. You are a gah-gah-good girr-rl, Rey-”_

There were sheets of music too, long horizontal lines with short tick marks and fat black dots blotting the spaces in-between them. Her Alpha promised he would teach her how to read them with her fingers at his piano. Sometimes when he visited her here at Kanata Hall, his fingers would read their words on their piano forte in the parlor. Long, beautiful fingers skittering like spider legs across the ivory keys. He could make the air sing to her.

That’s how she knew he was magic.

That’s how she knew she loved him.

When he was gone and she missed him, so hard her heart felt like it would split apart, she held these strange and special wonders to her chest and pinched her eyes shut and imagined him. Because her Alpha wasn’t in those usual things like all the others gave to their daughters. He was in the things that were different. That were secret, and thrilling, and unique.

Overcome by a rush of love for him so pure it hurt her, like slipping into bath water that’s too hot, she leaned over her little belly, over her legs stretched out and feet tucked underneath him, and kissed his lips.

Softly.

The tangerine juice on her lips made them peel slowly apart.

“I love you dearly, Papa,” she told him, as he had said to her many times.

“I love you so dearly, Rey. My treasure,” his thumb swept her cheek. “More than you can ever, ever know.”

The pulp in her mouth tasted dry and bitter. She swallowed, and piped politely, “May I have more, please?”

Remembering her earlier ire, she added seethingly, “ ‘fore Missy Nata makes me give it all to the piggies.”

“Misses Kanata makes you feed your treats to her sows?” he asked dubiously as he reached for a roll of thinly-sliced smoked meat on a plate painted with rosebuds set beside her.

She nodded emphatically.

It was a bold-faced lie.

She took it from his fingers like a little bird pecks up a seed between her beak. It was peppered but mildly, and salty. She smacked it to one side of her mouth to chew as she embellished, “She makes all of us feed our treats to the piglets. And she beats us. An’ our dolls.”

“Does she?” his lips twitched suddenly, eyes crinkling at the corner as this time he plucked up a sticky sugared date, “Oh my. What a travesty. Should we start a mutiny, do you think? Round up her and her henchmen and burn them at the stake?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Rey’s eyes lit with rightful revenge. She snapped up the date greedily form his fingers then wiggled her feet out from under him so she could tuck her legs beneath her and bounce emphatically on her heels. “Let's _scalp_ her, like Native ‘Mericans. Then we can go live in a teepee and make love.”

He coughed suddenly into a startled laugh, “I beg your pardon? _Make love,_ what do you know about a thing like that?”

She flipped her mass of thick, glossy curls tangled sweetly by the wind with the ends of her ribbons over her shoulder and stuck up her chin. “Kaydel told me all about it. S’when you lie down and kiss each other until you fall asleep. Then you wake up with a baby in a basket, right beside your bed. Can we name our baby Cesar? Or Pistachio? Or Misses French?”

Her Alpha rolled over, threw his head back, and laughed. His roaring was so loud it startled the wrenny birds from their perches in the alder tree.

“Come here you, mischievous girl,” he gathered her, skirts and crinoline and caplet and all and piled her onto his chest. He was still grinning wildly, like one of her painted sugar skulls, and it made her heart skip and race like when the girls all played tagged together on the lawn.

She’d made him happy.

He leaned up and kissed her soundly on the mouth. “You, _young lady,_ are far too impressionable. Don't you believe a word of what that silly chit says.”

Ooo, she couldn’t wait to call Kaydel a silly chit. Next time she tried shoving Rey over on the settee, or snatching her tea cookie off her plate.

“But can’t I come live with you anyway?” she wheddled as he settled her in against his chest, “it dossen have to be inna teepee. We can live in a treehouse. Or inna ship.”

“You wouldn’t like to live in the lovely house I’m building for you?” his chest rumbled with his deep murmur as he dragged his great coat over them both.

The wind creaked smoothly, soothingly through the boughs of the alder tree, making her remember rocking horses and old floor boards and her own lonely heart whenever her Alpha went away. She closed her eyes and listened for his chestbeat through his breast coat and shirts. Beneath his great coat, his fingers trailed tingling touch along her back.

She curled her hands near her face on his chest. The tip of her thumb stroked her mouth. “Course I would. I’d love to live in your house. I donn care what it looks like…”

“You shall, sweet one, you shall,” his soft voice lulled her. The long grass around the lake echoed his words like a whisper as the wind wove through them. Birds twittered, sharp but far off. Her thumb slipped into her mouth.

“Take a little nap with me, darling,” her Alpha took his top hat and propped it over his forehead to hide his eyes from the shifting light, as she nestled deeper into his dark warmth. “That’s it. Close your tired eyes…”

 

 

 

 

 

He carried her back up to the big house at sundown.

Already Mister Flincher, Missy Nata’s wind-up butler, had lit the gas lamps that hovered along the gravel path. The big sconces on the portico at either side of the doorway were lit, too. They bathed her stone lion guardians in gold.

All along the gravel drive, carriages and clockwork ponies were pulled up to take the Alphas home. Their girls clung and screeched and sobbed, their wails mixing and drifting up through the quickening evening like smoke from Cook’s chimney. It made Rey whimper around her thumb, and flinch deeper into her Alpha.

The other Alphas were strewn differently around the drive and spilling up into the foyer. Some were down on their knees with their daughters wrung around their necks, others were gently unpeeling clinging little hands from their trousers and their shirts.

Rosie’s Alpha was sat next to the staircase with his back to the wall, knees bent, uncaring if he crumpled his sleek black suit. He was holding Rosie sobbing into his neck and rocking as he sang to her in his deep, scary American accent. Rosie howled, “Please Papa, _please don’t go!”_

Her Alpha tipped his head back and looked into the lamps on the ceiling with wet eyes.

“Shhh,” Armitage rocked her lightly as he bore her gently up the staircase. Her chest twisted tighter, heart pounding with each creaking step he took up the stairs and down the hall.

She wanted to shout at him, to gnash her teeth and wail and whimper as the other girls were allowed to.

But she knew what he would say.

Chiding, and with a sternly look, as though she was being very naughty indeed, _“Goodness, what a raucous. How silly you shall feel when I am back before you’ve even begun to miss me. Tut-tut, young lady. That is not our way.”_

But she _did_ miss him already. Even before he laid her down and kissed her goodnight.

“Goodbye, my treasure,” he whispered, thinking she still slept. He tucked her Sophie-doll in beside her, and kissed her dolly's forehead as well. Then he laid her trinkets around her room, touched her hairbrush and her lace tea gloves. He stood a long time in the doorway.

Her mouth trembled. She suckled harder at her thumb.

“I love you, Rey. With all my heart,” he said. Then the door creaked shut, and he was gone.

She curled on her side into a ball and cried until it hurt so bad she coughed and couldn't stop coughing. She cried even as Rosie climbed into bed behind her and held her too tight as she sobbed into the back of her hair. Rey squeezed her eyes and bit her thumb and cried until she fell asleep from exhaustion.

 

 

 

She could not know that in his carriage as it pulled away from Kanata Hall, wringing the head of his cane in his gloved hand, that her Alpha cried silently too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *smirks impishly* I dunno… I'm loving this. Living my Golden Compass/Oblivion/Sense and Sensibility best life.


	3. Forsaking all others...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The jumpcuts. The glorious, glorious jumpcuts.

_London, 1891_

 

 

The Conservatory was nothing like Armitage expected.

Not that he, a royal officer with little more than an elementary grasp on the principles of modern science, had held any real expectations for what the world’s first and only cloning laboratory would look like. A rudimentary imagination, perhaps, cobbled from his experience of hospital rooms and the sensational, macabre illustrations from the penny dreadfuls. A long, sterile examination room, with cold metal surfaces and instruments exotic and bizarre.

He had never dreamed of finding a solarium buried twenty meters below the ground.

The false sunlight emanating from the glass tubing set high above the forests’ canopy stretched his eyes evolved for night-prowling painfully wide. He felt awkward, foolish even, standing in his black coat and tails, a silk scarf around his neck, as if he were going to the opera. His dark aesthetic was jarringly formal between the lush fabricated foliage and the beautiful young women weaving their play amongst it.

They were of every shape and color, dressed all of them in white silk shifts that accented the nubile ripple of their bodies and left nothing to male imagination. Indeed their garments were so slight, so sheer and lacking in length, that he could perceive the tender details of their breasts and glimpse flashes of their bare, round buttocks and the soft hair of their innocent sex as they darted laughing through the ferns and over mosses and held hands to make their merry. They were entirely unaware of their exposure, he could tell by their happy chatter, the hapless way they frolicked and the fearlessness in their dull doe-eyes. They were separated, the girls and the two parts of the underground forest, from one another by two stories of crystalline plate-glass. A river of polished white marble wended smoothly between the halves.

On it, he stood rod-straight and chin lilted, holding his lapel and wringing the head of his cane so hard his leather creaked. Disgust frothed at the back of his throat.

“How dare you bring me here,” he seethed quietly to Mister Granger, who was watching the young women through the plate glass as a shark studies a shoal, eyes unblinking and smiling with all its terrible teeth.

At his rebuke, his solicitor devolved to groveling. “But sir you see these ones are not bothered they have no  _souls-_ ”

Already, the brisk, infuriated _tap-tap_ of Armitage’s cane marked his progress down the white tile path between the cloche forests towards the exit. He passed a dozen or so girls calling sweetly to each other in their mindless, language-less chatter, coaxing at butterflies and gathering up flowers to braid into their hair.

 _Life._ Dulled, but still sentient. Trapped in a woodland dream from which they would never wake. Until their bodies aged, and they were tossed away, into what circumstances God knew and Armitage did not dare guess.

Least he lose what little sleep he could still wrest from his conscious.

His hand clenched at his lapel shook with the urge to smash the glass as he passed.

“Come now, _Officer Armitage,”_ a voice like Death’s, but smoother, wafted through the passage. Absinthe laced with belladonna and sweet vermouth. “Come, come, _come._ Let our delicacies be not so easily offended.”

He spared a dubious quarter-turn.

The creature speaking from where it lurked at the glass beside his solicitor was neither beast nor man. It was intelligence encapsulated in rot.

A body like a tallow wax candle caked in layer upon layer of drip, dressed in a sort of shimmering metallic robe from its waist up. The rest of it was hidden inside a mechanized shell, suspended off the floor by an underbelly of glass-cased gear work and bright penny brass. The shell’s shape reminded him of an arachnid, or a crustacean. Six jointed, independent legs ending in talon points poured down from its side body to keep it off the floor. They clicked one after the other against the gleaming marble tile as they moved, like notes sliding down a scale. In a discreet order yet in tandem.

The inventor of this hideous, malefic contraption, and of the clone-nymphs trapped behind the glass, called himself Doctor Snoke.

He beckoned Armitage with a cascading crook of all the long, twisted fingers of his malformed hand.

“ _Come._ Stand not on pomp and propriety with me, boy. There are no war heroes or statesmen here-” he gestured with a terrible sweep of his skeletal limb. If Armitage had thought Mister Granger’s grin the most hideous, he had been absolutely wrong, “only _lovers.”_

“You disgust me,” said Armitage, still sparing the creature just his profile.

The doctor’s smile turned amusedly offended. “As I do all.”

“No, I do not mean your _countenance,”_ Armitage spat. He faced the madman fully and pointed with his cane at the cloche forests on either side, “I mean your willful disregard for the dignity of these girls. For their _lives.”_

“You flatter them,” the doctor’s talon feet clicked eerie on the marble as he side-scuttled slowly up to the plated glass. With his fingertip, he tapped.

A nearby girl stopped her play and came up to the glass with an empty smile. Dimly and uncoordinated, as an infant would, she tapped back.

“You can see, they are hardly alive.”

Armitage’s gut twisted. An ugly rage splotched color across his high, hollow cheeks.

“And yet, you and _my good solicitor_ , Mister Granger, would have me marry one? You _charlatans._ You would have me pay you fifty thousand pounds for one of these phantoms- one of these _puppets_. Do you really take me for such a desperate fool?”

Through the glass, he saw another girl stare dumbly at a smooth stone she held in her fragile hand. She blinked slowly, like a reptile.

His nostrils stung, he feared vaguely that he would vomit. How Mister Granger must truly loathe him. For if this was not the most devious prank he had been subjected to in his difficult life-

It was certainly the cruelest.

"“Thank you, _gentlemen,"_ he raised his hand as he continued to leave, "I have seen quite enough-”

“My dear Baron,” the doctor rasped cloyingly when he had almost reached the door, “you do not have all the facts. Furthermore, I must warn you-”

Armitage paused.

“- consider the alternative.”

His shoulders slacked.

He had considered, on many nights, the bleak tapered march to a cold and lonely demise that was his life without an omega wife. A black parade of solitary dinners and anonymous whores until he passed away heirless and unloved. _Unfulfilled._

There was within him a deep yearning for a companion. For a lover. A woman on whom he could dote lavishly. A woman to know him, to miss him when he awayed. A woman with whom to share those thoughts that lurked within him, the poetic and the chilling and the fear-filled and the hopeful.

To love and to cherish.

At his side, standing at the glass, one of girls was watching him. Her head tilted slowly, very slowly, side-to-side.

There was no spark, no intelligence in her eyes.

“You mean the alternative-” he seethed, through his teeth and through the pain and the hopelessness and the _need_ ravening inside him, “to marrying _that?”_

He whirled and pointed to her. Rage like electric light flashed inside his eyes as he roared, “ _That,_ poor, dumb creature as the mother of my children? From _that_ I shall sire an heir?” he raised his chin and grasped his lapel, “You sir, are a fraud and madman. You are the greatest kind of wicked ill- _”_

“Calm yourself, calm yourself, Baron. Please-” the doctor pressed his gnarled palms together as if in prayer. “Calm yourself. Certainly I do not expect you to take one of these animals as a wife,” he chuckled, “Goodness no. No no these, my good Lord, these are merely a _representation._ The form, if you will.”

_Form?_

The doctor was clicking closer and closer along the tile, until finally Armitage could see his own perplexed desperation in the madman’s dark, glassine eyes. “My dear Baron-”

He laid his hand on Armitage’s shoulder. It was grotesquely light.

“These are but the raw materials. You may make your precious bride into _whatever you like_.”

_Meryton, 1899_

 

 

An ear-piercing shriek rent the tender peace that was late afternoon on the green, sprawling lawn of Kanata Hall.

“Chut up, Cici!” Rey screeched. Her dress was torn at the neck and listing from one shoulder, the toes of her white satin slippers were steeped in mud. Her silk stockings were soaked, ripped and streaked slick, mottled green from scrambling over wet grass. She wore a pink scratch on her left cheek that stretched all the way to her temple, mean little turtle-bites on the tender meat of her upper arm were already turning to bruises. She puffed, breathless and smarting but _triumphful,_ as she twisted a fistful of the other girl’s long, ice-blonde hair and dug her heels into the mud.

Narcissa, Queen Sheba of the prissy-girls.

The last of Rey’s foes.

“Help!” Cici was screaming like blue murder. Her stupid, perfect porcelain face was splotched with high color, eyes wild and terrified as, behind her, Rey bared her teeth and tried reeling her in by her curls. “Misses Nata! Papa! Help me! _Help!”_

Rey _wished_ she really could murder Cici, and all her mean, dumb friends. She wished she could pinch their arms and slap their faces and wring their stupid scrawny chicken-necks until they _snapped_.

“C’mere, you stupid li’le tyrant!” Rey snarled, snatching the sash on Narcissa’s dress with her other paw and dragging the girl backwards across the lawn.

Papa had taught her that word, _tyrant._ It meant _a stupid mean spoiled little chit with no consideration for the feelings of others._ A perfect cinnamon for Narcissa.

Rey knew all about cinnamons and hyperboles from her lessons. She and Rosie had been studying very quietly to themselves when Narcissa and her posy surrounded them. The prissies kicked over their ink sets and spoiled Rosie’s new sun-yellow dress. They called them _fat_ and _piggy-girls_ and _ugly._ They called Rosie’s Alpha a beesly ‘Merican and they called Rey’s Papa-

She couldn’t think of the name without bursting into sobs.

She had vanquished the prissies one-by-one, even when they all surrounded her. She had keened and battle-cried and kicked and bit and tiger-scratched. And she’d saved the worst prissy-girl for last.

Narcissa, the Queen Sheba.

Her punishment was sudden death.

“Thass _it_ , Cici! You’re walkin’ the plank!” Rey hoisted her kicking and screaming towards their treehouse set among the humongous branches of an ancient, smooth-barked elm. “Rosie, call in the sharks!”

But Rose couldn’t, she was being too pitiful on their picnic blanket beneath the elm, sobbing mewling and stutter-shuddering into the skirt of her spoiled dress for her Alpha.

Rey’s chest _burned_ with rage. She loved her Rosie, she was her best and only friend. Even more, she loved her Papa.

Her big, beautiful, generousable Papa.

And Cici had ‘sulted it all.

She hoped when she threw her from the treehouse, Cici broke all her bones and _died._

“ _Rey!”_

It was rudeful old Misses Nata, running crossways down the soft slope that swooped down after the hall’s large, circular pea gravel driveway, holding up her skirts with one hand and her hairpin in place with the other as she penguin-galloped ginger as she could over the rain-slick grass. She was hoarded by the defeated, spiteful prissies. They scrabbled after her tittle-tattling like a gleeful flock of hens.

“ _Rey, stop it now!”_ Nata howled, jowls jiggling.

“Help me, help!” Narcissa thrashed wildly, kicking her slippers and scratching at Rey’s hand in her hair.

Rey’s heart sped up, she knew what would happen next if she didn’t drop Cici ‘mediately and apologize. But her fear wasn’t enough to eclipse the raw fury whirling inside her, the burning sense of _unfairness_ as she heard Rosie sob and felt her own humiliation over the names the prissy-girls had called them.

Over what they called her Papa.

_No._

She wanted her revenge.

Checking the distance over her shoulder to her pirate ship in the elm, she wrenched Narcissa with all her might-

 

Misses Nata boxed her ears so hard she saw stars.

 

 

 

 

 

_London, 1891_

 

 

The consultation room of the Conservatory was a large, cavernous space with a domed ceiling set above the solarium, level with the cobbled streets. The doctor had told him the laboratories in which he fabricated the omegas was fifty meters below-ground, beneath the terrariums in which he kept the models.

 _To keep the sequencing engines cool,_ he said.

Armitage could not quite fathom what he meant.

“Shakespeare once said,” the doctor rasped now as he settled himself on his talon-legs behind a long wood conference table. All around them, the walls were filled with books on every subject from modern medicine to the occult. Some of the tomes, Armitage realized, were almost ancient. Others he was sure had been banned by the royal administration after the virus took its toll.

 Snoke quoted over his steepled fingers, “ _If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?”_  

“Yes, from _The Merchant of Venice,”_ Armitage murmured distractedly, squinting up curiously at the room’s mammoth cathedral dome.

From the large welded metal base at the center of the room and the hatch doors that spanned the length and breadth of a man set on opposite sides of the dome between its joists, he gathered the building had once been an observatory. Albeit a long time ago.

Its high-powered telescope that must have sat inside the base was gone, likely ransacked or ravaged for parts at the height of the outbreak. When the city of London fell under siege from its own starving, rotting people. But the building’s soul, its haunting sense of exploration and advancement and mystery, still lingered like a specter.

“You’ve read the classics?” Snoke sounded surprised.

Yet Armitage doubted it was sincere. The doctor gave the impression there was little he did not perceive about a man at first sight.

“A few of them,” he demurred.

“But how wonderful,” Snoke’s eyes danced with intrigue, “Your kind so rarely read the canon anymore.”

“You mean soldiers?” Armitage folded his hands mildly within his lap.

He had left on his gloves.

“I mean Alphas,” the doctor smiled. It was fatherly and frightening, “You are all so consumed with sciences and stratagems and political philosophies. Things you believe will make you more powerful _._ But then perhaps, it is merely that there is so little time for art when one is taming a new and dangerous world.”

“The girl,” Armitage redirected quietly. He had no desire to draw out this consultation. “My wife.”

“Yes, I was coming to that. You’re very eager, aren’t you, my dear Baron? And who can blame you? A young man in your prime. As I was saying, our old Mister Shylock’s point was but a half-truth. We are,” he gestured at Armitage where he sat across the table, tense and unamused, “flesh and blood, yes. With organs and bones and hurts and hungers. True true true. But that is where our similarities end. _At the surface._ For you see, through my lens,” he laid his hand slowly upon his chest, where his heart should have been, “we are _machines_. Intricate. Sophisticated. Highly specialized, and with a unique purpose. Those models of humanity which succumbed to the ravages of the virus were… _obsolete._ ”

Armitage tilted his head. His blue eyes glinted in the room’s only light, the greyly defeated London sky sieving down in loose-particle shafts through the high widows and the hatch openings inside the dome. “You find God to be an inferior craftsman, do you, Doctor Snoke?”

“ _Infinitely.”_ Snoke’s black eyes burned with a cold light all their own. _Madness._

“I found your answers to my questionnaire very curious, Lord Hux. Very _unusual_ -” he reached with a spidery hand for the leather-bound booklet Mister Granger had taken up to London from Meryton Manor a week ago. In it were linen paper forms painstakingly filled in by Armitage’s own meticulous hand.

It gave him an uneasy feeling knowing now _this_ was the man who had read his honest replies written by moon and candle light at the secretary near his bedroom window. After his droid-attendants and whore companions had left him alone. He felt vulnerable, overexposed to this man whose insanity was exceeded only by his irreverence for life.

“Unusual?” he folded one of his long, elegant legs over the other and lilted his chin, affecting calm.

“ _Very,”_ Snoke reemphasized, _“_ For when I asked you how highly you regarded such qualities in an omega as sociability, mildness and grace, you answered _moderately._ Yet when asked how you would rank curiosity, willfulness and _imagination,_ you said _very highly._ And when I inquired about how _intelligent_ you should prefer your omega to be, you answered…” the doctor perused until he found it, “ _as myself.”_

Again, he steepled his fingertips.

At his discreet position near the end of the table, Mister Granger made an alarmed, dissenting sound. One he covered quickly with a cough and a flicker of his forked tongue when his employer’s gaze narrowed.

Armitage stared directly into the doctor’s eyes.

“Is there a problem with my answers?” he asked quietly.

“Goodness, Baron, not at all,” Snoke’s benign amusement made him coldly furious. “None whatsoever. Of course, your dear one may be made to any specification you desire. I merely find it curious. For you see, over the years, I have made _thousands_ of omegas for the Alpha class. And as you might imagine, I have had some- _unorthodox_ requests-”

The baron held up his hand, “Spare me the details.”

“But I have never,” the doctor continued, “in over fifty years, been requested to make one that was _clever._ That was _brilliant_ , in fact.”

He grinned. It gnarled the mangled layers of his terrible wax-drip face. “What a _marvelous_ challenge she shall be.”

Armitage spared him a wry quarter-smile. “For you, Doctor? Or for me?”

The doctor’s black eyes burned brighter yet. “ _Both of us.”_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Meryton, 1899_

 

 

Breakfast was a quiet affair inside the dining room of Meryton Manor.

As the Admiral so deeply preferred.

He felt rested, tranquil even as he perused the paper and sipped black coffee from a fine china cup.

The whore-companion his household manager had arranged to be brought up last night from London proved herself highly satisfactory. A beautiful young woman, twenty years or so. Clever enough to beat him at backgammon and to laugh at his attempts to amuse her. They played a game and a quarter before the fire while chatting amicably about the late-season rain. He watched her delicate movements and her plump lips form soft words until she rolled a pair of sixes and laughed in a way that made him ache and burn in his gut.

He took her twice without resting. Harshly, on the dark oriental rug.

Her body was so beautiful, pale and full and unscarred. In glaze and in shadow from the light of the flickering hearth. He marked her on her breast, her shoulder, her tender inner thigh. With teeth. Over and over until she cried for him to stop.

He came deep inside her. Her breath caught as she took his knot.

She traced his scars with her fingertips as they lay locked together in front of the lapping heat of the fire. Her soft, pale eyes were large and sad.

 _“You been in a lotta fights, ‘aven’t you?”_ she whispered.

_“I have.”_

_“Poor beast. Bet you won them, though,”_ she smiled, and kissed his lips.

He brushed her hair back as he murmured, _“I did.”_

After that, he took her tenderly, kissing all the marks he had made on her body, making her shake with pleasure before he let her up to dress. He laid back on the rug over the smooth, hard slate with a cigarillo in his hand and watched her bath from a porcelain pot before the fire.

His eyes drooped peacefully listening the gentle wring of the washcloth and the tinkling of the water and the crackle of the logs. He watched the orange shifting light paint her white body gold.

The stars were shivering above him, laughing sweetly like girl-children when she touched his shoulder to tell him she should go.

He paid her well before his man saw her off into a stage coach back to London.

For the first night in months, he slept soundly, and felt renewed when he woke before dawn.

Now the day’s grey light was breaking through the high, paned windows of the dining room, drenching him and its pretty seafoam wall paper in gentle twilight.

He had chosen the pattern, cherry tree branches and Japanese wrens, for Rey’s love of birds.

“My lord,” Mister Carson, his household manager, roved smoothly through the open gilded door. Its clockwork gears cricked crisply beneath its traditional butler’s uniform. It was the latest model of manservant, purchased in a suite from an industrial exhibition the Admiral had attended in Hyde Park.

The vaulted glass and lush botanicals reminded him of the Conservatory. He spent the whole of the exhibition picturing his girl and how much its curiosities would delight her.

Carson bowed to offer him the telegram it bore on a small silver tray. “A letter has just arrived for you, sir. From Kanata Hall.”

Armitage set down his fork and knife, and sighed.

_Speak of the little Devil…_

“Carson,” he preempted as he slipped the tip of his butter knife through the envelope flap, “have the carriage brought around.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Now Papa, I know you’re cross-”

His beautiful little girl paused at yet another stone urn set on a pedestal at a crossroads of their gravel path and the others that meander through the garden.

Her small, bright fingers covered in many fine gold and silver rings to even her third knuckle plucked delicately at the lush, periwinkle blooms of a veronica flower overflowing the planter. She was avoiding his eyes as she piped, “But do you know what I find so ‘ffensable about tittle-tattlers?”

“Hmm. Might it be perhaps that they call you out?” he drawled, twitching his mouth to disguise his smirk. He was stopped beside her on the gravel pathway, arrested by her fragile, childish beauty.

He was supposed to be giving her a lecture on civility and social graces.

A futile endeavor, he’d realized, when he saw her waiting for him forlornly on the steps of the hall, elbow propped on the paw of a stone lion, cheek puddled in her hand. Her little pink lips set in a pretty pout.

How could he chide her, when she was dressed like the little child-concubines of Greece before the fall of their empire? In layers of pale gossamer and embroidered silks, bound gently beneath and between her barely-budded breasts with gold satin cord. The tanned skin of her arm and shoulders exposed gracefully, her sweet neck and its hidden gland vulnerable to the soft, lingering kisses he stopped beneath every archway of climbing roses and wisteria to lavish upon her, holding her tiny waist within the span of his hand.

In her hair she wore a simple gold braid tiara, with a single teardrop pearl dangling sweetly down her forehead. Her hair itself was now so long it laid in soft sable waves over and along her shoulders down to her waist, richly dark and dotted with fragrant baby’s breath and white hydrangea. He savored the sight of it slipping slowly through his fingers like Egyptian sands when she trailed ahead of him.

No, he could not scold one so lovely as his little wife.

Even now, as they walked alone amongst the reflecting pools filled with pink and white water lilies and between beds of riotous blooms in every hue, the fickle English sun admired down at her, its rays burnishing every ripple in her hair and the soft points of her tender face to white gold.

She was a vision of brown skin and marble white silks beneath the jealous, adoring sky.

He was hopelessly inferior in his long black coat and tails, his silk top hat and polished leather gleaming unnaturally in the pure golden light. In one ungloved hand, he carried his lion-headed cane, with the other he held onto his lapel so that her little fingers not tickling anxiously at petals and fronds could stay tucked safely inside the crook of his arm.

“Should I remind you, I had a letter this morning regarding your _behavior,_ ” he let his hand fall slowly over the waves of her hair down to her waist before he drew her to him.

She was soft, fragrant sunlight in his arms.

_Besotted._

“Have you and your little Lieutenant Roselyn been staging a coup?” he dipped to tickle the fine hairs near her ear with his nose, making her giggle, “You naughty girls…”

“I’m _not_ naughty,” she insisted as she turned and leaned back over his arm to eye critically the progress of her handiwork at his lapel. Already, its first button loop had amassed quite a cornucopia of delicate flowers and sticky sweet-smelling vines.

Meticulously, she slipped in the plumes of purple veronica and fussed them into place amongst the other blooms.

“Stand _still_ please, Papa,” she growled.

“Perhaps Misses Kanata has judged you unfairly,” he watched a shadow of anger and grief move over her face as he held very still, studying her with his cool blue eyes beneath his brim, “won’t you tell me what transpired between you and the other girls on the lawn?”

Her lip quivered. She stuffed it between her teeth and concentrated on her work.

When she was pleased with her arrangement, she tipped up her chin and finally, met his eyes.

Hers were round and sweetly wet.

“There, now you’re a gentleman.” She crooked her little finger at him, “You may kiss me now.”

He snorted as he bent deeply to oblige her.

Their kiss was chaste, familial. Even the way she strained up on the tips of her toes and pressed her small body against his was innocent and unknowing. A little girl longing to be close to the man she called father.

He wished he could halt time.

All around them, water babbled up from the fountains and the birds sang in sweet, sharp keys. The wind moved the trees to whisper its secrets up at the sky.

Their lips peeled apart with the gentlest sound.

He stroked his long, pale hand over her sun-warmed hair.

“Pa- _pah_ ,” she chided, batting his hands as she tried to worm away, “you’ll smirch my crown!”

“My my,” his eyes wandered over her face, beautiful and full. She was glowingly plump. As a child of seven should be, he thought. “What a mean little pussycat you are, Misses Hux. Taking swipes at your dear old Papa and scratching up the girls on the lawn. Have I spoiled you too much, I wonder?”

His fingertips tickled tenderly at the backs of her arms

She shrieked and giggled with her tongue between her teeth, shrinking back as she huddled into him closer still. “Papa, stop! S’not funny-”

“Isn’t it? Oh dear, are you going to gouge out my eyes?” in the shadow of his black silk brim, his blue eyes glinted with mirth, “You’ll find I do not go so easily as your girl-chums.”

“They’re _not_ my chums!” she barked.

He smirked. Her ire was so darling.

“Forgive me,” he raised his hands.

“I don’t!” she pouted, watching him hotly from under her lashes.

He gave her a charming sneer, “Oh I think you do.”

“Well, maybe…” she strained her fingertips up to take his harsh jawline between her hands. She was still frowning. “Only if you kiss me ‘gain. Then I shall forgive you.”

“Blackmail,” he smirked approvingly, “my word. Whatever are these women teaching you?”

“Kiss me hardly,” she said.

This time, he took off his top hat and gathered her up in his arms and lifted her up off the ground.

They swayed with the willows beneath the sun.

“Do you still love me, Papa?” she breathed when they were parted.

He snorted softly to himself as he set her down. _Oh yes, setting a fine example of self-control are we, Armitage?_

He straightened his lapels as he pretended to mull it over, lilting his chin at the watercolor sun. “Mm no, not a’tall, really. A thimble-full, I suppose-”

“Papa!” she shrieked, then screeched like a parrot as he lifted her by his hands around her waist and carried her over to the bench near their urn. Her little sandaled feet clattered sweetly as he set her atop its seat. Its wrought iron was the same white hue as her dress.

Even lofted, she was hardly level with the top of his chest.

“You’re beesly,” she scolded him. She wound her soft little arms around his neck.

“Oh, _beastly_ am I?” he nuzzled the tip of her babyish nose as he rumbled, “Shall I love you like a beast, little girl?”

He bared his teeth and played rabid, snorting and snarling into her gland.

“Papa!” she gasped, lashes flickering. She clung and giggled and melted into him.

“You are my love, Rey. You know that, don’t you?” he murmured into her ear, holding her against his heart. “You will always be my love.”

She nodded into his neck. The ends of her tiny fingers toyed with a bit of hair that escaped the nape of his collar. He felt her breath, warm and moist, puff against his skin.

She tipped up her face suddenly and kissed his temple. When he drew back to look down into her earnest, beautiful eyes struck amber by sunlight, she batted her lashes shyly and curled one little hand delicately beneath her chin.

“Oh please take me home with you, Papa,” she begged him breathlessly. Her lashes were wet with crocodile tears, “You’re my love, too. I don’t want to be apart from you any longer. Please, _please_ take me home-”

It was the same request she had made a thousand times, seemingly since she could string a sentence together. And now, it seemed she had added a heaving bosom and feminine desperation to her repertoire. Trust the tiny baroness of Meryton to turn even a scolding into the upper-hand.

He threw back his head and laughed.

“Heavens child,” he squeezed her round little rump in both his big hands and jiggled her, still chuckling, “am I paying Misses Kanata to educate you in philosophy and the arts, or in the ways of Persian courtesans?”

“Don’t laugh!” she bleated furiously. Her mouth shook, she stamped her foot and struck his chest. The little bell-beads on her sandals jingled wildly. “I hate when you make fun of me, I hate it!”

 _“Rey.”_ A wave of ugly shock crashed over him. All the humor slipped out of his features as he caught her wrist she raised to strike him again. “What in God’s name has gotten into you, child? Answer me.”

“I’m sorry, Papa, I’m so sorry,” she pleaded. Her breath quickened in a way that alarmed him greatly, he tried shushing her with long strokes through her hair as she wrung desperately at his coat, “please _please_ don’t be cross with me. It’s just that I hate it here, so much. Everyone is so mean and no one ever _talks_ to me. The girls all want to play dresses and jump ropes and stupid dollies, the grownups all say I’m spoiled and wicked and bad-”

 _“_ They _what?”_ he spat. His nostrils flared dangerously as he took her by the tender upper arms, “They said those things to you, Misses Kanata and your tutors? They called you those names? Rey, tell me the truth-”

 _“_ I _am,_ Papa, you’re not lissening! Please _lissen!_ I don’t care what they say, I’m all alone when you go,” she wrenched harder at his lapels as she began to weep, “There’s nobody to talk to, no one’s _lissening to me,_ Papa _._ Papa, _please_! Please just let me come home-”

Above them, the clouds drifted, cotton-wisp and sparse across the jewel blue sky. A crow cawed from the warbled, reaching branches of an alder. Small spotted frogs leapt off their lily pads and plopped into the cool waters of the reflecting pools, scattering black-and-orange koi fish. The peace of the courtyard seemed to mock them as he held her between his hands and wished for a thousand different truths.

That she were older. That he were younger. That he could take her away from this place this instant.

That she would never, ever grow up.

On the other side of the low stone wall that held back the sloping lawn from the garden, the younger girls of Kanata House were frolicking, laughing and shrieking as they darted about. He remembered how he used run after her when she too was so little. How she would whoop and screech incandescently, galloping as fast as her small legs could take her as she piped back to him.

_“Run faster, Papa, run faster! We’re cheetah-cats! Catch me, catch me Papa! Throw me to the sky-”_

He had watched over the years the other Alphas, especially with the older girls. Those omegas teetering on the verge of their quickening, who sidled blushing and chattering giddily into the forests with their Alphas, only to emerge at dusk shivering with swollen lips and marked bosoms and wet, frightened eyes. Their Alphas sated and slow-blinking, yawning and stretching smugly as they waited for their carriages by the hall.

His gut twisted. He longed to lift her onto his hip and away with her forever from this beautiful, sinister place.

_But how long will she be safe from me?_

A cool shadow swept over them as clouds hid the face of the sun.

He closed his eyes. “My darling-”

She shook her head as tears dripped from her lashes onto her cheeks, “No Papa please, _please_ don’t say no-”

“Forgive me,” though the gravel path bit sharply and his suit was brand-new, he took her little hands in his and knelt down before the bench.

The sun returned from behind its veil of white clouds and made a halo of light around her hair as he looked up into her face. “I must say no to you, for now. I know-”

She took a breath.

He held up his finger still laced through with hers. “I know. At times, it may seem unbearable. The separation between us-”

She clenched their hands, “It _hurts-”_

“Yes,” he shut his eyes as he nodded. He was breathless with burning ache, “yes it does. But my love-” he implored her, “I cannot take you with me just now. There are things between us that I- cannot explain to you-”

He searched for an answer she would understand in the soft curves of her grief-stricken face, “I am- not what you think I am.”

“I don’t care!” she shook her head. White petals like teardrops tumbled and fell from her hair to his feet.

“I don’t if you’re a wh-whoreson,” her breath tripped over the word. She cried harder, “and that you h-have no papa ‘cause he’s dead.”

Coldness trickled through him, seeping into the cracks between his ribs and through the gnarls in his gut. He stared sharply up into her eyes, “Who told you that is what I am?”

“The p-prissies. Cici an’ her fr-friends. She told me you’re a bah-bastard and you had to have a fat wife ‘cause you don’t have a real title,” she plucked shamefully at her belly through her dress as she wept, “She said Rosie and me’s ugly piggies ‘cause you’re a whoreson and Mister Ren’s a ‘Merican and the Girlmaker won’t give you beauty-girls. But I don’t c-care what Cici says,” she threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him. Her little body wracked with sobs, “I _love you_ , and I will be prettier an-an-and better-r if you let me come home with you, Papa. I pah-promise-”

He surged to his feet and wrapped her up in his arms. His heart shook with rage.

_Find the little bitch and break her neck-_

“My angel, my beloved- most adored one,” he dropped down to the wrought iron bench and set her in his lap. Through the layers of tender silk, he felt her soft warmth on his hard, broad thigh.

His heart pounded in his throat.

“You are, the most beautiful, most perfect child I could have ever imagined. Rey,” he tipped up her chin. Through the raw, animate violence winding up through his chest, he could smell her tears and the hydrangea blossoms and baby’s breath in her hair. Her small, still-developing mating gland hidden in the smooth slope of her neck. The scent of her sweet, tender sex, damp and fragrant like wet earth after a rainfall. He wanted to bury her in soft furs and satin bedsheets and coil his body around hers.

He wanted to hide her from the cruel, digging fingers of the world.

“I cannot begin to tell you, what utter perfection you are. How with every day that passes, you grow lovelier. More brilliant. More clever,” he swallowed around the raw, graveling emotion in his throat, “There was never a better girl in all the world.”

“I know, Papa,” she shuddered through a sigh. She nosed his gland and snuffled deeply, letting her breath stutter moist and hot over his neck.

“Shh-shh,” he closed his eyes and held her tighter. He rocked her until the urge to peel off her clothes and look for wounds and bathe her in fat, soothing laps of his tongue had passed.

His mate was desperately unhappy.

He would burn down Kanata Hall if that was what it took to make it right.

_All this time you fight your battles and play with your whores your kit is helpless selfish deviant criminal failure you are just like your father-_

His blue eyes burned cold fire as he opened them. “Tell me what is the name of this girl’s Alpha.”

“Lucian,” she whimpered and curled closer into his collar. “His name is Mister Lucian.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... can't believe it. I am *actually* writing a slowburn. Who am I?
> 
> If you're enjoying this one, lemme know : )


	4. By the power vested in Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jumpcuts (what's new?). Violence (what's new?). Creep (what's new?).
> 
> So, you know. The usual.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check yo'self before you wreck yo'self.
> 
> Read the tags.

_London 1868_

In a small, sumptuous room lit sensually by firelight and low-burning oil lamps hung with dangling colored crystals and delicately painted globe shades, a little girl stood stark naked but for a sheer silk robe draped open over her small body.

She was curved sweetly over a bright copper basin set atop a lace-draped side table, humming prettily over the quiet splash and trickle of water. Her long, thick hair was the color of a robin’s breast and fragrant with rose and lily oil, crimped beautifully from drying in a style of many small braids. Her pale, fragile features were painted in sultry kohl and attar mixed with crushed vermillion. She glowed in the sifting light of the lamps and of the fireplace, its flames reflecting in her vivid blue eyes and on her soft, red lips glossed with jasmine oil.

They curved with a musical laugh as she lifted tenderly her little babe from the basin filled with tepid rosewater and fragrant geranium and lily petals and raised him high.

“See how clean my dolly is,” she sang in her pretty Irish lilt, beaming as her eyes roamed his tiny milky-white body dotted with flower petals. He shone gold in the warm wash of light. “My sweet little Lord.”

The babe cycled slowly his plump little legs, shedding droplets of water that plinked on the surface of his bath, and blinked sleepily at her. His pale lashes spun gold by the firelight, he looked sated from his bath and his long sup at his mother’s young, tender breasts.

Though she was a very small beauty, her letting was generous, a fact about which she was very smug. Her handsome baby Lord ate like a sultan at his pleasure on long, leisurely meals of her milk and the breathy kisses she peppered on his soft cheeks as he suckled.

Oh yes, Miss Moira of the Baron of Meryton was an _excellent_ mother. If she said so herself.

She lifted her little love higher and brought his belly to her lips to kiss away the rivulets of warm, sweet-smelling bath, leaving behind crimson impressions of her lips. She covered him in kisses, gobbling him most in those places that made her heart trill with adoring pride. The darling little dip of his belly button. His flushed, succulent cheeks. His tiny rosebud knees and the sweet creases in the generous meat of his thighs. His pearl-toes and his plump, pink little cock dangling like a silkworm in its cocoon, tiny knot at its root. A darling little parody of his father’s, and another jewel in her crown.

For she, a nameless child whore-mistress of Regent Street, had birthed her Lord an Alpha.

“So perfect, you are, my sweetheart,” she sighed, holding him close so that she could trace the tip of her nose over his pursed lips. Her heart felt so swollen she feared it would burst and kill her in an instant. It wasn’t the virus, though she knew it was feeding off her now, even while her fingertips were still pink and her eyes still lucent and full of sight.

No. _T’was love._

“Now, Moira,” her madam-mother chided with affectionate exasperation from the dark tufted chaise at the end of Moira’s great bed. “Lord Hux will be here any moment. Come and let us dress the prince while you prepare.”

On the bed’s deep red satin duvet, beneath the lush damask canopy and its curtains drawn back with gold cord, were gathered the other house girls not currently entertaining their Alphas. Draped along their sides or bouncing restlessly on their heels, their eager, shining faces smiled as they reached for their tiny Majesty with all the greediness of young girls desperate for their turn with a favored doll.

“My Lord can wait,” Moira gathered her babe warm and slippery against her naked body and swayed, “First Armitage must pick out his dress. Mustn’t you, my love? ”

She bounced lightly as she carried him, back arched beneath his soft weight, to the little rosewood wardrobe she kept his clothes in. The armoire had been a lavish gift from her Lord.

She took her time choosing a jewel-hued sleeping gown of richly embroidered satin matched with a long tasseled cap. Armitage had dozens and dozens of gowns and bonnets, sleeping dresses and linen diapering clothes. Made from the excess of French silks and Spanish laces and the reels of velvet and fine cotton the girls ordered for their dressmakers, they each spent hours sewing his outfits by oil lamp, and hours more dressing him in their lavish, opulent creations. They loved to pose him on pillows and in the little scenes they made from props and draping, shrilling and squealing over his handsomeness and pretending to swoon in ecstasy when he yawned or cooed or burped.

“Come now, Moira,” Madam-mother clucked at her, beckoning with her peacock feather fan as the girls on her bed chittered and giggled and squabbled over whose turn it was to pin his diapering or slather him in rose cream, “You must not dawdle, my love. You are not yet dressed.”

“Who should care?” Moira closed her sheer, light robe around her babe and turned her body jealously so that they could not see him. She _hated_ to share him, and she got a perverse streak of pleasure in denying the other girls, none of whom could birth a child that lived longer than a fortnight. Most of the other babes were born dark and dull as coal and not breathing. _Infected._

She feared they would try to steal his love by spoiling him while her Alpha was here.

She was his real and only mother, he ought to love her _best of all._

Madam-mother, well versed in the pettiness and vapidity of young women, beguiled patiently, “Ah, but my love, do you not wish to see your Alpha? He has many gifts for you, I’m sure.”

Moira wavered.

Lord Hux _was_ very doting. In his own, severe way.

The girls chorused as, finally, she relented and laid Armitage tenderly on the bed.

His blue eyes blinked and he cooed at her. Like the gentle hoot of an owl.

Her heart ached with fatal emotion. It was that singular, all consuming love of a girl who has no true possession in world but the babe she’s born. No other purpose.

No other joy.

With the room fading away from them, she held the canopy poster and leaned her temple against its elegant carving and sang to him. Her eyes traced lovingly the soft curves of his little body as she watched him dress.

_“Darl-ling angel mine, I walk with thee in moon-lit gardens, while the spring-time air is fine. Who shall find me, but with that darl-ling angel mine-”_

“What a beautiful songbird I hear,” a man’s crisp, formal voice drifted coolly from the threshold of her doorway.

Her heart took flight as the lordly Baron of Meryton stepped inside.

Tonight he wore his dark riding suit with cape and top hat, in his left hand he carried is silver-hilted cane. Though not particularly handsome, he was fascinating to look at. Angular and proud, tall and white as moonlight. With red hair much paler than her own vivid mane, and sea-colored eyes that held no warmth except for when they looked on her.

The room was a chorus of trills and flutters as he called her quietly, “Moira, my Moira.”

Ignoring them, he removed his cloak and top hat and set them aside. His lips twitched faintly at one corner as his gaze swept over her naked body framed in her gold gossamer robe.

As if they were the only two in the room, he adopted the standard pose of an English gentleman and murmured chidingly with mirth twinkling in his eyes, “My my, what shocking impropriety are we about tonight, my little dove?”

She propped her hands on her tiny hips and lilted one for good measure, showing off her little breasts still rosy from feeding his babe as she shot back, “Says a _gentleman_ who enters a lady’s room without a knock.”

“ _Moira_!” her madam hissed.

But her Alpha only chuckled. The girls tittered and whispered excitedly as he crossed the room in a few long, elegant strides.

Somewhere in their midst, her babe mewled sleepily.

Her heart pattered as he approached her. For as much as she pretended, she really could love Brendol sometimes. Like this time, when he took her into his arms and _kissed her_.

How he kissed her. Long and deep and _soft_ …

“I missed you, little dove,” he rumbled, voice dark and thick as smoke. His clothes still carried a chill from the outside, he smelled like a long ride in fresh autumn. He smelled strong and virile and male.

Her lashes flickered, her slender hands held onto his lapel. “Aren’t you goin’ to say hello to him?”

She hated how hopeful she sounded.

She hated him too, when he sighed so put-upon before he turned. “Very well then.”

The warmth in his eyes retreated as he held out his hands for the perfect little creature dressed in linen diapers and long satin nestled sleeping among a sea of admirers on her bed.

 _Armitage._ Her beautiful, beautiful boy.

“Let us see the whelp.”

_  
_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Meryton, 1899_

 

Teeth bared and _snarling_ , Mister Solo wrenched another of Misses Nata chairs off the floor and over his head so high its peg-feet squeaked against the low ceiling before he hurled it back down onto her battered partners desk, where he’d beaten all the chairs before it.

It smashed apart with a _CLAP!_ that was louder and more evil than thunder.

“ _Are you trying to make a fool of me, woman?”_ his big barrel chest stressed the buttons of his tan twill waistcoat. His shouting shook the room. “ _I’m not paying thirty thousand Gotdamn dollars for you to sit on your fat ass and play favorites against my wife. Do you have any idea who the hell I am?”_

Rey flinched deeper into her Alpha’s neck and quaked.

_Please make him stop, please make him stop-_

“-sh-sh-shadow of the valley of death, I shall fear no evil-” behind her desk, Misses Nata pressed herself back harder against the greyed wallpaper with eyes squinched tight and rambled softly through her prayers as, on the other side of her small office wedged into a corner, Rosie rocked herself with her hands clapped over her ears and sobbed, “-for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort-”

“God and Jesus can’t help you now, Missus Kanata,” Rosie’s mountain of an Alpha straightened menacingly and red-faced and sneering till Rey feared his bulk would swallow them whole, “I’ll _show you_ the shadow of death, darlin’-”

Rey wanted to run, she wanted to scream, but each time her panic tried to burst free of the pit clenched tight like a fist in her tummy and take her over, she would hiccup and breathe in a deep draught of her Alpha’s scent simmering warm and soothful like spiced broth from where she was pressed into his neck. That and the crisp, authoritative cologne that clung subtly always to his collar bathed her in the knowing that _nothing,_ not even this big stupid brute-Alpha, could touch her.

Not while Papa was here.

 _Stay still,_ a voice as soft and sweet as a lady-doll’s whispered from the place on her own neck under her long curls, just behind her ear. The spot that made her tingle inside like she was made of fireflies whenever her gentle Alpha touched or kissed her there.

Papa himself sat still as a mannequin with her still dressed in all her sheers and jewelry in his lap, poised like King Charlemagne after he won the battles of Tertry inside Missy Nata’s stiff-backed chair. The one by the small hearth she used in the evenings to coo the little babies to sleep and do her mending. The only one Mister Solo dared not throw.

All of Solo’s boom-screaming hadn’t made him jump once. If anything, her Papa seemed elegantly bored _._

Rey’s thumb paced anxiously at the seam of her lower lip as she shifted, she turned her face hidden on his shoulder so she could whisper close to his ear so that Mister Solo wouldn’t hear, “Papa, Rosie’s scared…”

“Is she?” he bounced his knee, making her headdress tinkle lightly, and clicked his tongue.

“Mister Solo,” he called wearfully.

The big beast wheeled round, chest heaving, teeth out, and snarled, “ _What?”_

She flinched deeper into Papa’s neck and clung to him, whimpering until his big, strong hand smoothed her hair down her back. She felt him raise his chin.

“Lower your voice,” his was soft as an asp’s hiss, and just as dangerous. “You’re frightening the girls.”

Beneath the shadow of his jaw, she watched Mister Solo slack his mean stance. He lowered his black-burning eyes from her Alpha’s piercing blue gaze, snorting like he was ‘barrassed as he took off his tan bowler and raked a thick, meaty hand through his hair. “Suppose I’ve impressed my point.”

“Quite.”

Then he noticed Rosie in the corner crying for all she was worth. “Ah, hell-”

His bootsteps rattled the floorboards as he crossed and knelt down, “Hey now, kitty-girl, what’s all that carrying on about, hm? You know Papa’s not mad at you, darling.”

He gathered poor Rosie. “C’mere, ladybird-”

She kicked and struggled and squealed, _“no!”_ like a pup caught by its scruff, but her Alpha folded her up in his big ugly arms and shushed her until her squeaking went to whimpers and her feet dangled useless at the floor.

“There, isn’t that better?” he mumbled low to her in his hoarse gravel, “ _You are my sunshine, my only sunshine- you make me happy, when skies are grey-”_

Rey squinched her eyes shut and clung even closer to her own Papa, more grate-filled than ever for his smooth, quiet rumbles and tenderly touch.

“Ge-gentleman,” Misses Nata’s voice shook up from the wall, “please leave this house at once, or I shall call to the authorities-”

Solo peeled his lips over his teeth and _growled._

Rosie and Rey-baby whimpered.

But Papa said quietly, “I am the authority in Meryton, Misses Kanata.”

He shifted Rey in his lap.

It was rare that he held her in front of strangers or even Misses Nata, saying it wasn’t _digniful_ for their class. But right now he kept her tucked close to his heart with his long arm wrapped possessively round her, his other ungloved hand wringing the head of his cane like a threat as he nuzzled once and deep into her hair.

She felt strange when he turned his face and spoke to Misses Nata. Fluttery and sleepy. Like she wanted to lie down naked on her belly in the soft, sun-warmed grass and let him find her. Let him crawl over and lick-

“And I am not leaving until I speak with Lucian and his bride,” his hot breath on her neck melted her liquid, but his words ghosted cross the office cold as ice.

“Yes, General,” Misses Nata’s voice was hardly there at all. “Yes, of course...”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_London, 1883_

 

 

The first time Armitage killed an Alpha, it was during the great tempest that destroyed half of what would be known later as Baron’s Wharf.

Thick, freezing sheets blew east over the ocean and pummeled the rotted grey wood of the docks. It soaked through and plastered his shirt and woolen trousers to his long, lean frame and bit harshly at his face made gaunt grey from lack of sleep and hunger. It made the soles of his workboots, worn thin and smooth by the last the boy who owned them, slip on the algae and rot. And it slicked the heavy metal drums of rice grain and guano he carried from the cargo ships down their rusted, ramshackle ramps to the docks.

The gulls taking shelter on the ship masts screeched meanly over the shouts of the foreman while the rain blinded him, stinging his eyes slit one-quarter open so that he could hardly see the boy in front of him headed down the ramp. Hot, rank steam chuffing up from the boiler rooms of the cargo ships and the putrid stench of piss and fish and rotting barnacle made the air almost too sick to swallow before deluge pummeled it back out of his lungs.

The other workers, big boys and grown men, carried their barrels in two- teams down the ship ramps. But they were betas and did not have his strength. Armitage had to carry his loads alone - each one the weight of a cart horse - on his soaked and narrow back.

Gasping and squinting against the grey-on-grey rains, he slipped on a smear of algae near the base of a ramp and fell sideways.

His sidebody hit hard on the wharf and sent a shock of pain through his shoulder so bright-burning it made him cry out. His barrel of guano slammed onto the dock and bounded away from him; he scrambled after it on his hands and knees, too terror-stricken to notice he had no feeling in his left arm from how hard he’d hit the dock.

“No, no no _nonono_ -!” he breathed.

Too late.

The barrel rolled past the chewed edge of the dock and splashed into the blighted waters of the marina.

For one wild heartbeat, he considered leaping after it to tow it back to shore half-a-league inland from where they were now, then carry it back to the dock.

But already it had sunk, leaving nothing but a seething trail of froth on the roiling waters behind it.

And Armitage could not swim.

A fact that strangled his mother’s faltering, withering heart each morning he left their slum-dwelling inside the whore district in time to reach the shipyard before dawn. Despite his protestations, she would drag herself from their cot before the hearth to wash his face and his hands for him and comb apart his hair. She would dress him – as she once dressed his own father, who had abandoned her to the ravages of the virus – with attention despite her weak breathing and trembling hands. Then she’d feed him, a warm breakfast of wheat gruel sweetened with cheap cane-brandy. Her gentle, shaking fingers trailing love along his shoulders while he ate.

 _“My dolly,”_ she still called him. For she had been but a little girl when he was born.

Already, the tips of her fingers had turned black. As had her lips, which she pressed softly to his temple and to his mouth each morning he stood in the door between the predawn darkness and her slow-furling death.

Down on his hands and knees on the wharf, between the rain pummeling him and the wood rot, he heard her gentle voice begging him, _“Stay away from the water, my dolly. Oh my sweetheart. God go with thee. And don’t look the Alphas in their eyes.”_

“You, boy! Worthless stinkin’ whoreson-”

He heard too late the whistle of the foreman’s long leather crop.

A soft _shhhhhr_ like a mother shushing her babe, before its deafening lightning crack across his vulnerable back.

The pain was electric; it woke something sleeping inside him. Something with long talons and sharp teeth and bright, night-prowling eyes. Something he had never felt before.

It burned everywhere under his skin and howled deep in his gut.

He threw back his head and screamed out.

“Teach you to tah be careless wiff my cargo-”

With the second shrill of down-stroking crop, his body twisted of its own free will.

His small pale hand shot out and caught the lash before it connected. His grip creaked around the wet, slick leather, arm trembling with the strain.

The foreman was three times his size.

An Alpha.

Broad and roughhewn sinew, big enough to blot out the sun if it had dared to shine down on him. His face, neck and the hide above the open lace of his filthy tunic were brindled by scars.

He grinned down through the torrent of fetid rain, reeking of cunt and coppery opium smoke, drunk as all on bathtub gin.

“If you won take yer licks like a man, sonny,” he menaced loud enough to be heard over the tempest and the work further off down the wharf, “then I’ll ‘ave tah snap yer neck and frow you into the marina like a _rat-”_

All toil immediately around them had halted. The boys huddled quickly near the hitch carts half-loaded down with barrels. A few of the older ones sneered gleefully, as others watched with wary curiosity from beneath the dripping low-slung bills of their caps. But most of them were cowering with fright.

Last week, the foreman beat a lame boy to death.

Armitage felt his heart thrash in tandem against his ribs with where it was also caught raving inside his throat. Deep within his mind trapped below a heavy darkness, a voice was struggling and screaming for him to _run._

But already, his lips were peeling back twitching over his gums.

He tightened his grip on the crop, making the blue veins of his forearm stand out through the soaked second-skin of his shirt sleeve, and _snarled._

The other lads choked and screeched and scrambled back.

“Well look who’s testes juss dropped, aye!” the foreman boomed laughing. He drug Armitage up to his feet by his grip on the crop. “Think you’re an Alpha, boy? Wanna be topdog on my dock?”

His backhand came faster than Armitage could brace for it.

Thunder clapped at his temple, he lost his grasp on the crop as he reeled sideways and stumbled down to one knee.

Through the fog of confusion, he heard the whistling sound too late. The crop whipped him across the face hard enough he saw lights as bright as staring straight into the sun.

His heart beat inside his temple and rang throbbing through his ears. He tasted blood.

 _“Oh my sweet dolly,”_ his mother sighed.

 _Kill,_ said the beast stalking inside his gut.

He coiled and leapt.

The foreman let out a roar of surprise and scrabbled to drag him off.

But Armitage was too slick from the rain and sweat and the guano that leached from the seams of the barrels. He saw with a clarity he never had before as his slender fingers dug _hard_ into the forearm’s meaty flesh.

He clawed and clambered up and over the foreman’s shoulder; the Alpha roared and reared back to snatch a fistful of Armitage’s hair deep down at the scalp.

Exposing his vulnerable throat.

On instinct, Armitage opened his jaw and bit down.

Already and without him knowing, the pressure he could apply with his teeth was greater than that of the beasts lurking in the Nile. Thanks to the same virus that ravaged his sweet, beautiful mother and put out the light from her pale blue eyes.

He killed that foreman beneath the tempest in front of twenty-some whoresons and workhouse lads. He ripped out the brute’s jugular and spat it onto the dock.

That was the moment it became Baron’s Wharf.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Meryton, 1899_

 

Mister Lucian, Cici’s Alpha, was as pale and pretty as she was. Dressed richly like Papa in all black silk.

He stood severely inside the doorway to Misses Nata’s office, cold grey eyes swooping like hawks over what Mister Solo had done to the poor chairs. Mister Solo he seemed very unimpressed by, but whenever his eyes landed on Papa, they lingered in a way that swelled her chest with vicious pride.

He was afraid of her Alpha.

And that made _her_ Queen Pirate.

Cici was goin’ to get it now.

“What I fail to understand, _madam_ ,” Mister Lucian narrowed in on Misses Nata. His black leather hand clenched round Narcissa’s nape wrung her subtly, the other gestured as he spoke, “is how any of this matter concerns myself or the men standing inside this room. A girls’ squabble, really? Is that worth the time of a gentleman and-”

His eyes swept dubiously over Mister Solo, “esteemed tradesmen?”

“Now see, what I have to wonder is,” in his corner taking up half the room, Mister Solo shifted baby Rosie clinging to his tan longcoat from one hip to the other, “if you’re such a great gentleman yourself, how come your little one here doesn’t conduct herself in a manner more becomin’ of a lady?”

He nodded at Cici, who turned white as a lily and choked.

“Just an inquiry.”

Papa tapped his cane on the floor and remarked, “Here, here.”

“I daresay I look to Misses Kanata for such _moral instruction,”_ Lucian turned a killing gaze on Misses Nata, “as that is what I pay her for.”

Grey-faced and shaken up behind her ruined desk, Misses Nata tried to start, “Mister Lucian, I-”

“Do you know why the Empire lost its Eastern and African colonies to the virus before it was contained?” Papa cut in. He was still seated casual-like in the high fabric armchair by the dead hearth, babe tucked neatfully in his lap with her head beneath his chin, one ankle crossed gracefully over his knee.

Unlike Mister Solo’s bark or Mister Lucian’s growling or Misses Nata’s nasal simpers, his voice was deadly soft.

“Incompetence,” he said. “I find it is the genesis of every problem. _Poor leadership_.”

He enunciated with another deft rap of his cane.

“Take, for example, the story I heard whilst here to chasten my wife. That _your bride,_ Narcissa, and her little gang of sycophants _mocked and berated_ my wife and her companion where they attempted to play peacefully on the lawn, goading her into actions of self-defense. At which point, she was struck-”

His blue eyes quicksilvered to Misses Nata cowering closer to the wall, “- savagely. And was sent to solitary confinement until such time that I arrived-”

“Now General,” Misses Nata warbled, terrified and prim, “I’d hardly call her room solitary confine-”

“Do not speak, Misses Kanata, unless spoken to,” Papa clenched his white fist and ground the foot of his cane into the floor. His gaze never left Mister Lucian’s. “Or I shall rip out your tongue and feed it to this _dog_.”

Mister Solo raised his chin approvesomely and crowed, “Here, here!”

Lucian sneered his lip. “Well? What would you have me do about it? Beat her in front of you?”

He shook poor Cicci like a rag until she buckled and cried out, “Papa _stop_!”

Rey’s insides twisted, all the warm glowful triumph nipped out like a candle flame as Mister Solo rolled his red lips together and placed his hand not holding Rosie’s soft thigh meaningfully on his belt.

He nodded once. “That’d be a start.”

Cici clawed and scrambled and bleated helplessly.

Rey felt sick until her Alpha said, “Not quite.”

Her heart hammered, she clung to his lapels like they were driftwood as fear tossed her in waves so cold and dark-deep. She tried not to hear or see or be in the room anymore as he continued.

She hated revenge.

She _hated_ it.

“You see, it is the _content_ of the insults issued by your wife to mine which I find so egregious. _Content_ ,” Papa’s enunciation was like the rattle of a snake, “too mature for a child her age to grasp, let alone _conjure up_. Which brings me to my point. _Poor-”_

He rapped.

“- _leadership.”_

He rapped again.

“Prejudice is, as you know, the malefic form of ignorance. It must be _taught._ After all, these little girls are still quite the marionettes at this age. They parrot whatever they hear. Don’t you agree, Misses Kanata, as our _expert in residence_ on child development?”

Misses Nata swallowed stumbling out quietly, “Y-yes, my Lord. General. Yes, that is… quite-”

“Ah, there you have it,” Papa tapped his cane twice more. It might as well have been the swing of a gavel.

_Guilty, by pirate law._

“What then?” Mister Lucian tried to drown his fear-face in ‘nnoyfulness. But Cici looked terrified enough for them both as he forced her a step deeper into the room held out at arm’s length. A little sobbing, white-dressed shield for a grown-up man. “Shall I break her neck? Would that be _satisfactory_ enough for you, Hux?”

“You have not listened.”

As if she weighed nothing, as if she wasn’t holding him hands-twisted in his slippery silk suit coat like she was going to get swept up and drowned if she didden, her Papa peeled her high off his lap and set her on the floor beside the armchair and then stood.

Mister Lucian did something she’d never seen a grown man do in her life. He bared all his teeth and slunk back and _growled._ Real-growled.

Like a cornered dog.

Mister Solo shifted Rosie back on his hip and snarled.

But Papa only lifted his chin.

“It is you whom I hold responsible for the torment my wife has endured, Lucian. Apologize to her, and I shall let it pass.”

Mister Solo snorted and shook his head like Papa had told a not-funny joke. Mister Lucian crowed an ugly laugh.

“Apologize to _you_ perhaps, for offenses a silly insignificant _breeder_ might have wrought on my behalf,” he gave Cici a vicious shake that made her scream and the petrified Misses Nata stretch out her hand and screech, “ _Please stop-!”_

“But you expect me, a Mountbatten – an _Alpha –_ to make apologies to _that,”_ he jerked gracefully his chin at Rey where she cowered behind Papa and the chair. “That contrived _thing-_ a brood mare-”

She sensed the quickening in the air around her Papa, how it crackled with a cold killing fury as his eyes glowed like blue diamonds.

Like endless, angry Hell.

For the first time in her life, she felt afraid of him.

“That _contrived thing,”_ he hate-spoke in a voice unlike any she’d ever heard from him. It brimmed with death and thunder. It came directly from his chest, “Is my _wife._ Blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh- when you wound her, _sir,_ you wound me. And since you seem so _intimately acquainted_ with my origins and reputation, you of all people should know what it is I do to the man at whom I take offense.”

Lucian flared, “You wouldn’t _dare!”_

Papa smiled, the grimmest lizard-smile she ever saw. “Oh wouldn’t I?”

“Alright now, General, alright-”

It was Mister Solo’s turn at calm-papa as he stepped in a little closer, Rosie still hiding in his lapel. His hand was out, a kind of olive branch only other Alpha would take for how fearsome it was.

“I know you’re raw about what was said to your little one, and believe me, so am I. I also know you boys out here have a code of honor by which you live, and I admire that. Mightily. But I can tell you with unabashed certainty, because I have six girls of my own back home, that these young ladies are going to have their fair share of petty squabbles. That’s just the nature of raising too many chicks in one pen. Now-”

He tipped down his black gaze at Narcissa, who wilted like a daisy beneath the blaze, “Lucian’s little girl here took it well past the line, there’s no refutation about that. So give her the belt or break her neck and we’ll call it even-”

Rey’s heart lurched in her chest and she gasped, imagining this big ‘Merican brute-dog doing just that while poor Rosie tried to drown her panicked wails in his chest.

He was staring straight-on at Papa.

Papa looked coolly back.

“Because what you’re proposin’ as the alternative is untenable. Plain and simple. No dust-up between little ones is worth drawing a Reaping circle, no sir,” Mister Solo shifted Rosie’s weight further back on his hip, “And we don’t apologize to each other’s breeders, I don’t care if we’re in England or Katmandu. It’s not the way things are done.”

Quiet fell over the room like darkness after a drape is drawn; Cici shook red-eyed and stutter-gasping, bleating hard like a lamb on the cut-house floor. Her Alpha squeezed the back of her baby neck until his gloves creaked and held his breath; Misses Nata pressed her mouth into the crease of her kissing hands and prayed with all she was worth. Rey herself couldn’t breathe – she _couldn’t –_ not with Rosie crying and Misses Nata weeping and Cici sobbing for her life. Rosie’s Alpha waited while Mister Lucian coiled up like a snake.

Everyone was looking at Papa.

He tilted his blue-winter eyes at Mister Solo and asked, “Are you finished?”

Solo nodded just once. “I reckon so.”

Papa’s gaze slid to Mister Lucian. “And you?”

Lucian lifted his stubborn chin.

“Very well then.”

From her hiding spot behind the chair arm, Rey thought Papa’s profile had never looked more prideful – or more beautiful – then when he looked Mister Lucian in the eyes and said:

“Draw the circle.”

What that meant she could have never imagined. Because what happened after he said it was beyond even her imagination, which she always thought was richer than a nightfull of twinkling stars.

Mister Solo lurched forward and shouted, “Now wait just one minute-”

Misses Nata put her hands on her face and screamed.

And Mister Lucian snapped Cici’s neck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“General, _I’m begging you_ -”

Misses Kanata and the young American Alpha, Mister Solo, poured after him down the loveworn hall of the girl’s school towards the lawn. Her keys rattled on their iron ring, she held her skirts and pounded the hardwood with her heeled buckle shoes to keep up with his elegant, purposeful stride.

He kept Lucian in his sights ahead of him; the Earlson of Weatherfield County had shed his gloves down the hall and was stripping furiously out of his cloak.

In his arms swaying softly with his sure gait, the General held his wife.

She had fainted after…

“Please don’t do this not here in front of the children this is a calamity, _General!”_

He stopped abruptly beneath the dangling globe lights of the central foyer. Their lamps were not yet lit, the only light was from the warm sconces washing down from the split staircases and the cool-tone twilight seeping in like mist from the open front doors.

He knelt and laid his love in the center of the clean-swept, threadbare rug.

Her long, adorned hair pooled like gathered silk the color of honey and dotted with tiny petals of mottled flowers. Her cheeks were pale.

He kissed her mouth before he removed his coat and folded it. Placing it beneath her head, he looked up to find young Solo standing nearby.

Holding his own fragile bride.

Their eyes met. The General asked, “Would you be so kind?”

He swept his hand over his sleeping wife.

Mister Solo nodded. “Surely.”

“Thank you,” the General inclined his head before standing in one smooth motion, as smoke off a black mountain gathers together to reveal the shape of Death.

His hands and teeth would be his scythe.

 _“How many Alphas you kill?”_ a pretty whore companion once asked him, as her delicate soot-tipped fingers traced his scars.

Since that day on the wharf beneath the tempest- _“One hundred.”_

He never lied.

“Why are you doing this?” Misses Kanata was sobbing, holding his strong forearm now clad only in white shirt. “A girl is dead-”

“Why my dear woman,” already, over his shoulder, he could hear Lucian using his cane to draw a circle among the gravel. He smiled down at the old crone, all teeth and no warmth.

“To teach you a lesson.”

She stumbled back.

“Gather her things if you would, Misses Kanata,” he drawled as he rolled up his sleeves. “We will be leaving after the Reaping. My wife and I.”

He spared one last fond gaze at his precious angel sleeping beneath the chandelier, and then stepped out to meet glory once again in twilight’s maw.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_London, 1889_

Mother’s soul went to rest on a Thursday, in a neat rented room above a leather shop on Firth Street.

Though the night outside was clear and bleak, cruelly cold, she laid in a warm soft bed propped up by down feather pillows with lace-trimmed shams. An opium pipe kept by the oil lamp on her nightstand made her last days peaceful and dreamlike. She liked to stare softly into the painted roses glowing on frosted glass shade of the lamp as she smoked. By the end of her life, the skin around her eyes and mouth and both her feet and her hands were black as ash.

She was only thirty-and-one.

He sang to her, songs of love found and lost on the green hillsides of Belfast. He washed her hands and her face with clear water from a white porcelain bowl.

 _“Look at my son,”_ she rasped smiling, eyes drooping. The seam of her black lips wet. _“Foreman to the biggest shipyard in London. And an Alpha. Would you look at that, my own sweet doll…”_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Meryton, 1899_

 

 

His mechanical horse-drawn carriage drew swaying away down the white gravel drive of Kanata Hall.

White, save for the circle near the front entry. There it was red as his dress shirt soaked through beneath his silk coat.

“Papa?”

It was the tender croak of the world’s sweetest sleeping girl.

“Shh, close your eyes,” they rocked with the gentle jolt of the hansom, her curled up in a brocade throw blanket inside his lap. Her treasures and trinkets tinkled in their trunks and hand baggage all around them. His cane held loosely in his left hand

She curled her little white fingers in his collar and mumbled, “Where’s Rosie?”

“Gone home to America,” he said.

“Mm,” his sweet one nuzzled deep into the gland in his neck, where his blood still boomed lustfully from his kill.

“Canni write to her?” she sighed.

He tipped his head back against a bolster and shut his eyes. “Every day, if you like.”

How _right_ this felt, how destined. His omega home and nested and settled, fed and brushed and tended, bathed in oils and draped in gold, grown up and kissed and parted, lavished – _so lavished_ – swollen and bred-

“Hm?”

“Where’s Cici?” she repeated, her voice was as loosely woven and far away as his mind.

Sleeping, they would sleep together. Every night.

“She’s sleeping, my love…”

She slipped her thumb between her lips and said no more.

_Slipping under, slipping soft. My love is here now, I may rest…_

His last thought trailing like steam behind him was of Lucian Mountbatten dying screaming on the gravel, broken limbs and a torn-out throat, Narcissa’s name on his last breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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**Author's Note:**

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